Writer's Block Magazine

As far as human records are concerned, our solar system has been visited by three interstellar objects in its history. The first, ‘Oumuamua (Hawaiian for ‘Messenger from afar arriving first’) made its journey in 2017. The second, 2I/Borisov, passed through in 2019, and now, in 2025, we’re visited yet again, this time by 3I/ATLAS, an object that scientists have identified as a comet which will be with us until December 2025, just before the start of the new year. Don’t worry; ATLAS’s trajectory doesn’t pose any threat to Earth, but it has managed to pique people’s interest in a different way. For one, the comet seems to change its speed as it nears the sun – it has an ‘anti-tail’ that points towards the solar system’s centre instead of away, and it ejects abnormally large amounts of nickel, an element which isn’t usually dominant in comets, but is a known discharge of certain rocket fuels. While scientific consensus has already determined that we are not dealing with an alien spacecraft, there are still many people online who have started to speculate, either fearfully or with excitement, over the kind of close encounters that could occur within the next months. Will we finally know we’re not alone in the universe? And if other living organisms can survive outside Earth’s atmosphere, does that mean there is a future for us out there too? 

From contemplating the boundless mysteries of the solar system, I’d like to invite you back to Earth, where one man in particular has his eyes firmly set towards the sky. When Elon Musk’s SpaceX announced in 2016 that the company was going to initiate space colonisation missions, “making humanity multiplanetary” by colonising and cultivating Mars, the news got many people excited. SpaceX’s marketing strategy has always been to encourage this kind of excitement, framing  its mission as the only path forward for our planet and as the solution to the dangers posed by climate change. The image Musk wants us to believe in when we think of SpaceX is one of collective hope. The company is “founded under the belief that a future where humanity is out exploring the stars is fundamentally more exciting than one where we are not.” We’re supposed to be excited for humanity, for the progress space travel implies and for the future it enables “us” to live. Or, in the words of the CEO himself: “You want to wake up in the morning and think the future is going to be great – and that’s what being a spacefaring civilisation is all about. It’s about believing in the future and thinking that the future will be better than the past. And I can’t think of anything more exciting than going out there and being among the stars.” (my italics) Notice how we, the reader, are being directly addressed, that our attention is brought to the fact that SpaceX and the future are synonymous, and that Musk very carefully attempts to write his own clear excitement into us: you and I are connected, and look at this cool thing I’m going to do for “our” civilisation.  

But what will this hopeful future actually look like, and who are “we” to imagine it? The main pages of SpaceX’s website don’t answer this question directly, but a quick search reveals that the Mars colonisation mission centres around the ambition to build a city for 1 million people, approximately 0.012% of Earth’s global population. It doesn’t make any promises beyond that for the approximately 8,299,834,000 people that would remain bound to Earth. The goal here isn’t to create a sustainable life for all, nor to use Mars’ resources to help those people still on Earth. The only aim is to construct a city and transportation system for Earth’s elites so that those select few financially able to travel to Mars and back can do so at their leisure. In the face of climate catastrophe, SpaceX becomes Noah’s Ark for the extremely rich – the only difference being that now the Ark itself is hostile to our climate, and rather than being a protector of life, an active contributor to its destruction. BBC magazine reported in 2021 that “SpaceX’s Falcon 9 gets through 112 tonnes of refined kerosene, emitting about 336 tonnes of CO2 (the equivalent produced by your average car driving almost 70 times around the world). As well as greenhouse gases, rocket engines emit chlorine and particles of soot and aluminium oxide that destroy ozone.” God forbid these rockets ever become routine travel methods. Add to that the fact that poor time management and structural underfunding for entrepreneurship have led to the explosion of a great number of Falcon rockets, and the question arises: who are we doing this for? Who are these people and what do they want?

If our definition of the ‘Alien’ is of the outsider, that which does not live on Earth, isn’t from Earth, then the desire of humans to leave Earth could be seen as Alien behaviour: these people reject their shared connection with others to the planet, while at the same time evoking a language of unity. The aliens are attempting to become us, to become human. It reminds me of a film that I watched at much too young an age, and that terrified me for months; Men in Black. In it, an alien takes over the body of a farmer in an absolutely gruesome fashion, subsequently attempting throughout the film to mimic human behaviour while the Men in Black try to chase him down. It’s a world where aliens are part of Earth’s population, adopting human identities, while trying to become similar, yet simultaneously maintaining loyalties to outer space – to the unknown and unavailable to the human inhabitants of Earth. Our dependency on Earth is what makes us human, what unites us. Taking this into account, a desire to leave the planet, to become the inhabitants of a different planet, could be seen as a literal process of alienation: a desire we are starting to see emerge among the extremely wealthy and powerful. Still, we (all 8 billion of us) are so terrified and enamoured with space and alien life that we spend billions of dollars monitoring the solar system around us for (hostile) activity; every comet is closely scrutinised and speculated over. Meanwhile, our surveillance of what’s out there only shows human astronauts and rocks, and our hyperfocus on the outside has meant we’ve failed to notice the 0.012% people in power on Earth have managed to become alien to their home. As such, it seems the alien is here already; it’s just preparing for departure.

Written by Robin van Minnen

Cover Picture: TheOtherKev on Pixabay