Lennart Ruff
The Titan

This film introduces a concept that is not entirely new, but still rarely the subject of a science fiction film and scientific speculations in general in this specific form. The film is called "The Titan" and is directed by Lennart Ruff, starring Sam Worthington in the lead role of Rick Janssen, a soldier and future astronaut. It is the year 2048: overpopulation, pollution, and global warming are rapidly driving Earth toward an inevitable end and humankind toward its extinction. In this context, a secret NATO military operation, supported by NASA, devises what seems to be the only possible plan for the continuation of the species. The assumptions are the impossibility of intervening to reverse the trend toward the inevitable end of our planet and the inability (at least in the short term) to adapt any other ecosystem to support terrestrial life with those terraforming processes that we know today require practically thousands of years. Thus, the only solution seems to be to adapt humanity to another type of ecosystem, altering and forcing the human evolution process through methods of dubious ethical and scientific value into what scientists on staff would soon define, considering Titan as the chosen destination, as "Homo Titanicus."

Janssen is one of the men selected to undergo this experimental project that involves making "robust" modifications and alterations to the subjects' organisms by introducing enzymes from other animal species that could provide the biological system with the particular conditions necessary for adaptation to life on Titan. He will eventually emerge, after a series of deaths during the experimental phases due to the extreme nature of the project, as the only one capable of reaching that ideal final state. The question that arises at this point, already during the development phases but especially in the end, given Janssen's loss of any identity and any typically human characteristics, is to what extent he can still be considered a member of the same species of which he should represent an evolution and the only hope for survival as a vanguard to be sent to planet Titan and test his ability to adapt to this new context.

"The Titan" is a film that, in my opinion, has significant metaphorical and scientific content and poses ethical dilemmas as well as a dramatic or even tragic narrative because how else could we define the fate of a human being made "alien" and destined to be literally tested as a true survival experiment in the desolate and rarefied terrain of Titan? How else could we define the story of the first and only of a new species who is simultaneously ideally also the last of a species destined for an inevitable end given the madness of this practically unfeasible plan? On the ethical level, however, it is difficult for me to delineate a clear "line". In general, we consider evolutionary processes to be autonomous and independent, but we also know this is not the case: there have always been genuine choices of convenience that have modified and defined our evolutionary process up to this point. At the same time, forced and accelerated evolution, piloted in a "scientific" manner, certainly constitutes something unprecedented (or the subject of misguided speculation) and which currently seems impractical to me according to the forms proposed in the film, but assuming circumstances demand it, how unethical would this truly be? At the same time, this context and the situation depicted make me think that the only realistic evolution in that particular dimension does not concern scientific experiments but the choices humanity will make as a whole even in an irreparable crisis situation, after which I am convinced it would still manage to survive even if unprepared to fly to other planets. We too often underestimate our species, yet just looking back would be enough to understand the infinite prospects that open up to us.