Spirit took a photo on May 19, 2005, a photo of a sunset. The probe had launched from Earth some two years earlier to land on Mars half a year later. The sun here is peculiarly white and surrounded by a bluish haze that fades into a rusty brown sky. You could almost mistake it for a sunset on Earth until you notice that the colors are inverted. The horizon cutting into the white sun is low, with a jagged ridge of hills rising up on the left half of the image. The ground is brown-red, because the sand is infused with iron-rich minerals. It looks cold, and at night on Mars, the temperature can drop to minus 85°C. Spirit is a vehicle with six wheels that turn in all directions, under which the oxidized sand is a crackling cushion. The car runs on solar power. But it is just that: a car. No one hears the crackling. The photo was taken before the first human was even up here, a seeing without seeing. Spirit’s successor, InSight, sent the first sound recordings from Mars in 2018. It’s a dull rumble that sounds like the sinking feeling of intangible loneliness blurring the line between self and environment.

Spirit and InSight are not the first artifacts on the Red Planet – more will follow. The timeline points toward the future: utopia, it lies ahead. An architectural firm has already made blueprints of what buildings on the planet 54.6 million kilometers away might look like. They will be 3D printed and assembled by robots. And if the climate makes life on Earth impossible, then an outpost for humanity can be built here at some point. The search for life on Mars has fallen to the wayside, although primitive microbes have been found in the planet’s ice. What’s more important now: How can life be possible here in the future?

We can perhaps differentiate between two types of utopias, one in the near and very near future, the other in the past. Both help us make sense of the present, both in completely different ways. One of those who is best at pulling something like evidence or circumstantial evidence from the mists of the past that our best days are behind us is Erich von Däniken. His pet project, prehistoric astronautics, is spectacular. He wants nothing less than to turn our entire understanding of history upside down. The utopias are behind us; we are perhaps descendants of extraterrestrials. Do we have a utopian past? For the development of intelligence, is there an eternal return?

Therein resides a great beauty and a bit of melancholy. In 1944, young Erich experienced something when he saw eight men. Like beings from another world, he thought, of the American soldiers stepping out of a bomber that was forced to make an emergency landing in Aargau, walking without a word past the child. Later, the Swiss hotelier, who wanted to be a scientist but wrote bestsellers instead, saw the traces of aliens that had brought civilization to a primitive humanity with their temples and pyramids. Melted rock, landing strips for UFOs, astronaut suits in cave paintings: it was all evidence of pre-astronautics. There are 232 question marks in his first book, he says. He dreams himself into worlds of fuzzy references until he finds the “world formula” somewhere. But if he didn’t have an explanation for everything, his narratives would be more convincing, and if his perspective didn’t remind us so much of the civilizing mission that imperialism once used to justify itself, von Däniken’s visions of the past wouldn’t be so simple-minded. What we need for the future, perhaps, are fictions that do not search for closed systems in the fog, but only further fog.

The answer may well lie in the gentle color gradations of the Martian sunset, rather than in the contradiction-free confluence of myth and technology. Perhaps they prepare us for inconceivable loneliness, the point at which the boundary between subject and object is punctured. We don’t have words for it yet, but Sigmund Freud once alluded to the oceanic. Limitless and unbounded, he called it: the invention of eternity. This is not a metaphor. The first thing is that we will see differently.

Philipp Hindahl