As the band played The Dark Side of the Moon, we sat cross-legged and stared at the intergalactic visuals overlaid with 90s graphics. Dry-eyed, we felt dizzy from motion sickness.

When I unglued my eyes to look at the crowd, they were all staring at the semi-spherical ceiling where the projected screen was. They stared in unison yet utterly in their own world. So separate from one another, I wanted to scream and jump for any human connection. I was scared in my detachment and by the detached society I found myself. My friends and I shared sugary, chocolate snacks but nothing else so much as a whisper. It was a spectacle; entertainment at an intense level; a rock band playing Pink Floyd underneath 180 degrees of overly stimulating space visuals. Plus we had chocolate.

However, I couldn’t shake off an equally intense dread. Not just at how detached, separated and individuated we’ve become, but also at how Godly we think we are. I imagined this show produces the same propaganda for fascist nationalism but at a species scale; complete with xenophobic, classist structures that normally ripen with nationalism. I imagined the show made people proud to be human. Not just proud at the ability to put on a show, but proud at the illusion of astronomy-scale omniscience. And an omnipotence that comes with being able to map and navigate between stars, as if space was there for the taking. And yet why would we even want to colonise extraterrestrial space, even if we had some Promethean gift of fire that allowed us to? Have you even seen actual footage of the surface of the moon? It looks like shitty concrete; like an abandoned carpark that would only be fit for hiding from the eyes of the law. Homeless people would find the ground cold and uncomfortable; skaters would get annoyed by the potholes.

How we marvel about how much we know about space. How powerful we feel that we could conquer other floating rocks. All I could think was, ‘So what?!’ And, more importantly, what price did we have to pay to get to this point? Consumerist ecstacy that requires us to work to limit our imagination, creativity, play, our time, our freedom, our souls; to keep the furnace of society burning with the coals of progress. We pay not only by the 16 € planetarium admission fee but also by losing our connection to the world - and, fuck it, the universe - around us. By losing our connection to each other and to the full depth and breadth of our selves. We can no longer even pay enough attention to allow us to nurture any kind of meaningful connection. Our conversations are about DJ sets on Soundcloud and how bad the coffee is in Kenya.

When the show ended, I breathed a sigh of relief. Even though consumerist ecstasy kept me wanting more, I needed time to mourn and bereave our Earthly connection. I needed the phantasmic space shuttle to crash-land back home. It was all too much; more than I could take; and I was no better for it.