Some find it impossible to cope while others realize living on Aniara with its many activities might actually be better than a dying Earth or a bleak Mars. How will everyone react? Chefone does his best to assuage fears by saying it’ll be two years tops before they can make their way back, but that’s enough of an increase from three weeks to throw people into hyperventilation regardless.

Either a celestial body interrupts their path to slingshot back or they simply drift forever. So despite having enough self-sustaining electricity and algae (for air and food), there’s no way to return onto their necessary trajectory. Expelling it may save them for the moment, but without it they cannot steer. Unfortunately a screw breaches their hull anyway, pushing their nuclear fuel supply to critical mass. But there’s a first time for everything as a small field of debris forces Captain Chefone (Arvin Kananian) off course. It’s a routine trip that’s never run into problems with many passengers already having family on the red planet to greet them upon arrival. The title shares its name with a city-size spacecraft ferrying humans from Earth to Mars in barely three weeks. One such example is Nobel laureate Harry Martinson’s 1956 epic poem Aniara, which Pella Kågerman and Hugo Lilja now bring to life. Our art has attempted to give shape to what that desperation will look like either via our futility to prevent it or our technological advancement to cheat death and inevitably destroy another world too. We recognize previous extinction points and realize ours will arrive sooner or later whether from a dying star or our own steady dismantling of those intrinsic properties for which Earth seemed to have in abundance.

Beyond religious scripture lies the science that we aren’t long for this universe - at least not in context with its breadth of time and space. There’s no bigger example of this truth than our premonitions of apocalypse. Suddenly we can no longer take the reins of our circumstances. And it can disappear in an instant - one hiccup along a path of tenuous certainty throwing perfect plans into chaotic turmoil. We search for meaning and answers, struggling to reconcile that happiness may have always been an illusion to mask the pain. It’s only when we’re cornered without an exit that we start to let our fears rule us rather than the infinite possibilities in our grasp. No matter how difficult things become, there’s always a hope for better or an avenue towards change. We have the ability to move our homes, restart careers, and work towards a future of our choosing. So much of our desire to exist is based in control.

Aniara martinson