We are alone

"Ad Astra" is a 2019 American film starring Brad Pitt, Tommy Lee Jones and Donald Sutherland. It´s a slow paced "long and realistic space journey" film, but does have an interesting message. Set in the near future, it features a space-faring human civilization that has colonized the Moon and Mars, while a manned mission to Neptune has failed. Interestingly, humanity is still split into different nation-states (some of them rogue) that fight over resources in outer space. Old time religion has survived too, with the astronauts constantly praying to Catholic saints and angels. (The "psychological evaluations" seem to be a form of pseudo-Catholic confession.) 

When life on Earth is threatened by weird energy surges, US Space Command realizes that their source is the research station in orbit around Neptune. The leader of the Neptunian mission, heroic space explorer Clifford McBride - believed to be dead for 16 years - is still alive and conducting bizarre experiments at the station. SpaceCom sends a new spaceship to Neptune with orders to destroy the mad scientist´s hide out with nucelar weapons. Clifford´s son Roy McBride follows the mission as a stowaway and kills the crew. Eventually, Roy is forced to confront his father anyway, since the old man really has lost it...

One of the plot twists is that Clifford McBride is a fervent believer in the existence of alien intelligent life. The point of the Neptunian research colony was to scan the known universe for evidence of such life. The search was futile: humans are alone. When McBride refused to accept this fact and go home to Earth, a mutiny broke out among the science crew at the Neptune station. In response, McBride killed everyone but himself, and cut off all communications with Earth. 

I think it´s obvious that the "mad scientist" is really a symbol for the religious zealot or fanatic, and that the "aliens" are a metaphor for God. Thus, the hidden subtext of "Ad Astra" is atheist: "we are alone in the universe" means "God doesn´t exist". Ironically, however, "Ad Astra" can also be seen as a criticism of modern secular belief in progress. As already mentioned, the futuristic civilization is strikingly similar to our own, warts and all, just more extended in space. During the Space Age, our destiny was indeed said to be "in the stars", and the idea that we are all alone in the universe is deeply terrifying and repugnant to many modern atheists, obviously because it disproves "progress", which has replaced the divine as a quasi-transcendental source of meaning. There *must* be alien civilizations out there, more advanced than ours, to prove that unlimited advancement is possible in a godless universe. And just as Clifford McBride refuses to accept what the data tell him, modern space cultists will never come to terms with the simplest solution to Fermi´s paradox: we are alone (or - even worse perhaps - intelligent species do exist in other solar systems but can´t or won´t go far into space, and neither can we). 

Roy McBride finds a kind of salvation in human relationships at the end of the story. Perhaps both Christian theists and star-worshipping atheists do best to join him...