Dreaming beyond a fallen earth, By Osmund Agbo

It is at this juncture suspended between indignation and exhaustion, that hope begins to seek refuge in unexpected places. Having largely relinquished faith in humanity’s moral architecture, I find myself redirecting intellectual energy away from politics and reform, and towards the notion of escape. Not escape as physical flight, but escape as imaginative defiance.

The American space agency, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), is poised to launch Artemis II, a landmark crewed mission that will carry four astronauts on an approximately ten-day flyby around the moon and back. This will mark humanity’s first journey beyond the low earth orbit in more than half a century.

Scheduled for liftoff from the Kennedy Space Center early this year, the mission is designed to rigorously test life support, navigation, and deep space systems aboard the Orion spacecraft and the Space Launch System rocket. Although Artemis II will not attempt a lunar landing, its success is widely regarded as a technical and symbolic inflection point, signalling a renewed willingness by humankind to look outward at a moment when confidence in life on earth feels increasingly fragile.

I do not presume to know how others live, but my mind functions like a NASA rover, restlessly and methodically traversing unfamiliar intellectual terrains in search of coherence. I move across disciplines and bodies of knowledge, observing, recording, and attempting to decipher signals hiding in plain sites. My writing is little more than a contemporaneous record of what I encounter and what bothers me. And of late what keeps me awake the most is the world we inhabit and, more urgently still, the one we appear destined to bequeath to our children and grandchildren, should they one day arrive.

There are moments when reality grows so grotesque that imagination itself recoils. The steady stream of revelations emerging from court filings and investigative reporting connected to Jeffrey Epstein belongs squarely to this category. Each disclosure feels less like a revelation and more like the confirmation of a long-suppressed suspicion: namely that the world is not governed by law, ethics, or shared values, but by a narrow, insulated elite whose power renders them functionally immune to consequence. Reverend Martin Luther King Jr’s belief that the moral arc of the universe is long but bends toward justice now feels like an alien concept, one seemingly no longer applicable to today’s world.

What renders these revelations truly paralysing is not only the alleged crimes, but the institutional betrayal that appears to have shielded them. Epstein was not merely a solitary deviant operating in obscurity. Credible reporting points instead to a sophisticated ecosystem that facilitated access to the most powerful, while quietly accumulating leverage over them. Politicians, financiers, royalty, and corporate leaders across ideological and national boundaries circulated within his orbit. Some accounts further suggest that these activities were known, at least in outline, to security agencies and may have intersected with the interests of a foreign intelligence service.

These claims remain allegations, but they are sufficiently grave to compel uncomfortable reflection. If figures occupying the highest echelons of global power could be compromised through sexual blackmail, and if institutions tasked with safeguarding the public either failed or declined to intervene, then the very notion of moral leadership collapses. Power, in this configuration, ceases to function as protection for the vulnerable and instead becomes a sanctuary for the predatory.

For Africans, this disillusionment carries an additional sting. We are routinely subjected to lectures on governance, transparency, and human rights by the same global powers now struggling to account for their own evasions and silences. Our failures are amplified and moralised, while theirs dissolve into sealed records and procedural ambiguity. When arbiters lose credibility, the legitimacy of the entire system is called into question.

For those reared on the mythology of global order, this recognition is profoundly destabilising. The United States, in particular, has long been portrayed as a flawed yet self-correcting force, a kind of moral anchor within the international system. To discover that this anchor may be hollow, sustained more by performance than by principle, is akin to watching a carefully constructed effigy collapse under minimal pressure. What remains is not reassurance, but disquiet.

At the core of this moral disintegration are children, girls subjected to systematic exploitation in the service of the appetites of men already endowed with vast wealth and influence. That such abuses could persist for years without meaningful intervention drains whatever residual faith one might retain in the narrative of human progress. It suggests that civilisation may be less an ascent beyond primitive impulse than an elaborate mechanism for concealing it.

For Africans, this disillusionment carries an additional sting. We are routinely subjected to lectures on governance, transparency, and human rights by the same global powers now struggling to account for their own evasions and silences. Our failures are amplified and moralised, while theirs dissolve into sealed records and procedural ambiguity. When arbiters lose credibility, the legitimacy of the entire system is called into question.

It is at this juncture suspended between indignation and exhaustion, that hope begins to seek refuge in unexpected places. Having largely relinquished faith in humanity’s moral architecture, I find myself redirecting intellectual energy away from politics and reform, and towards the notion of escape. Not escape as physical flight, but escape as imaginative defiance.

It is here that space reenters the picture, not as a logistical plan, but as a psychological sanctuary. NASA’s Artemis programme, and Artemis II in particular, has come to function for me less as a schedule than as a symbol. Artemis represents a moment in which humanity looks outward once more, daring to extend itself beyond the constricted and corrupted chambers in which power currently resides.

Artemis II is not a mission of conquest. It will raise no flags and establish no settlements. Its ambition is deliberately restrained and in that restraint, almost ethical. It exists to test, to observe, and to endure briefly beyond earth’s immediate protection. It reminds us that human ingenuity is not irreducibly tethered to domination or extraction. At times, it is animated by curiosity alone.

I may never depart this planet. I may never encounter Mars except as a distant red point against the night sky. Yet, the mere fact that humanity can still imagine a horizon beyond itself, however faintly, offers a form of hope that terrestrial life increasingly struggles to sustain.

The programme itself is far from pristine. It is costly, delayed, and shaped by political compromise. Mars, the destination most often invoked in these conversations, remains an environment of extreme hostility. To imagine self-sustaining human presence there within my lifetime demands a degree of optimism that verges on the fantastical. Even if the technological barriers are overcome, the economic ones remain formidable. Space travel continues to belong to states and billionaires. I harbour no illusion that I will ever afford such a journey, should it one day become feasible.

Yet hope does not require a ticket.

Mars, for me, is not a place but a posture. It signifies the possibility that humanity might still aspire to something beyond its most corrosive instincts. That we might envision futures not organised around secrecy, exploitation, and impunity, but around exploration and shared vulnerability. Space has a way of dissolving illusions of hierarchy. On a failing spacecraft, there are no elites, only humans bound by equal fragility.

In an age when our presumed moral leaders stand exposed as hollow, looking upward feels more restorative than looking around. Earth today feels morally congested, too much power concentrated in too few hands, too many transgressions hidden behind closed doors.

I may never depart this planet. I may never encounter Mars except as a distant red point against the night sky. Yet, the mere fact that humanity can still imagine a horizon beyond itself, however faintly, offers a form of hope that terrestrial life increasingly struggles to sustain.

When confidence in institutions erodes, survival sometimes begins not with solutions, but with the audacity to imagine life elsewhere.

Osmund Agbo is a medical doctor and author. His works include Black Grit, White Knuckles: The Philosophy of Black Renaissance and a fiction work titled The Velvet Court: Courtesan Chronicles. His latest works, Pray, Let the Shaman Die and Ma’am, I Do Not Come to You for Love, have just been released. He can be reached through: [email protected].