Modern emancipation is, perhaps, nothing more than a backward glance.
Once, what we could not understand we called God.
The unknown had a transcendent face, a higher will to which we entrusted chaos.
Today, the unknown is called “Alien.”
The substance has not changed — only the language.
We replaced the theological sky with the astronomical one, yet the mechanism remains the same. We continue to attribute to the outside what we fail to decipher within.
Are they rewriting the collective imagination?
Or are we, as always, creating new figures to sustain our fears?
The Moon — with its shadowed side — is the perfect symbol.
Every era has its “hidden side,” its unilluminated portion.
It does not matter whether there is a base there or only dust: what matters is that humanity needs to believe something dwells in the dark.
Mars, red and silent, becomes memory and warning.
A planet we imagine as uninhabited, yet in our collective fantasy it has already been civilization, development, error, self-destruction.
Perhaps the narrative is cyclical.
Perhaps the idea is always the same: a civilization grows, exploits, crosses the limit, and falls.
And so the transfer is not geographical, but symbolic.
Not from Mars to Earth, but from one era to another.
Ancient chroniclers spoke of “fires in the sky.”
Babylonians, Romans, red signs above the horizon.
Galactic battles? Or interpretations of what could not yet be understood?
The theories are countless.
But the truth, if it exists, is simpler — and more unsettling:
we ignore our past.
Or perhaps we fragment it, simplify it, make it functional.
Memory is power.
Whoever guards the narrative guards the direction of humanity.
We continue to “conquer” — space, planets, the future —
but perhaps we are only fleeing from a deeper question:
who have we truly been?
The Alien may be nothing more than a new mirror.
Not an invader, but a projection.
Not an external presence, but the symbol of an inner distance.
Perhaps there is no secret agreement.
Perhaps no base exists in the shadows.
Perhaps Mars is nothing but rock and silence.
Yet one certainty remains:
humanity tends to forget.
And when it forgets, it creates myths.
Yesterday: God.
Today: Alien.
Tomorrow — what name will we give to the unknown?
