UNDER THE STARS

A few years ago, a scientific researcher told me about what fascinated him and which remains engraved in my mind: the awareness of the tiny thinness of the film covering the surface of planet Earth, like the varnish on a billiard ball, where we have been evolving for a few billion years. I had never looked at our reality from this angle. I thought of the ocean as a gigantic abyssal skylight and not a puddle! I embraced the atmosphere like an infinite space close to the stars and not reduced to a few short kilometers! Listening more recently to a lecture by the researcher-philosopher Bruno Latour, I learned that the definition of this earthly paradise was called the Critical Zone. A scientific concept that appeared at the end of the twentieth century in the United States and has been taken up by many international researchers in an approach described by researchers as interdisciplinary, integrated and long-term, structured within research infrastructures dedicated to the observation and study of the "habitable zone on earth".