The Mothership

The Devil’s Tower rises from earth to heaven, bark turned to stone, 800 feet of column carved straight into the sky. Some say it was once a tree — the only tree large enough to reach the heavens, the trunk our ladder, the branches our passage. The stuff of creation myths, a universal truth.

The giants walked among us then, until something severed the cord. The story goes that when the tree was felled, heaven was cut off, and all that remained was rock — simply a very large rock.

Alas, humankind has never been content with simple, or with simply a rock. A rock is a paradox. A rock is a warning. Was it carved by the devil’s hand, or released as a gateway? A rock is a haunting. We worship what can crush us.

Our temples have always been carved from stone. Even now, our brilliant minds are trapped in underground labs, searching for the origin of life while the sky hurls riddles at us we cannot solve. Paradigms and theories about space and time defy measurement. The paradox of possibility. The concept of infinity. And still — we remain obsessed with rocks.

And now: 3I-ATLAS stands sentry by the rings of Saturn, aimed toward our sun.

A mass unlike anything we’ve seen before, so of course it must be a rock. A very fast, very large rock. But still, only a rock.

Discovered on a July night by a telescope in Chile: 130,000 miles per hour, hurtling toward the sun, the third interstellar object to wander into our solar system. It was immediately dismissed as space rubble — until a Harvard professor went rogue. A mad scientist who blew the paradigm wide open, leaving room for the possibility of extraterrestrial life over the midday news cycle.

Harvard calls it an interstellar object, more precisely a UFO. Conspiracy theorists can’t help but listen: a verse they’ve been chanting for decades echoing now through the learned halls of academia’s elite — We cannot discount that this could be first contact.

YouTube goes one step further and calls it the mothership. The return of our galactic parents to the home we’ve been trashing for thousands of years. Surely they are disappointed in the state of our house.

NASA does not say what the giants look like, but the novels always promised they would be beautiful enough to distract us. I wonder if they will make us vegan, forbid the slaughter of life that bleeds the planet’s resources dry. Just one of our many gluttonies.

Reddit whispers apocalypse. MIT’s World One program warned us of a year of collapse: pollution, depletion, unsustainable growth. The IPCC said the same — catastrophe if we cannot hold to 1.5 degrees. Perhaps the aliens are here to prevent 2040. Perhaps they are only here to witness the end, to remind us the Earth has been fine without us all along, to hold the mirror up to our folly. It is us who are unsustainable, not her. We are the problem — it’s us.

Perhaps the mothership returns to the beginning — to the Tree of Life, same as the Devil’s Tower. Maybe the giants have returned to reclaim Mother’s children, to gather what can be salvaged, to save the best of us (surely there is something worth saving among us), and leave the rest to stone.

Or maybe it is simply another rock, hurtling through the dark. A rock that carries ancient memories: of a tree, of a ladder, of the heavens — an echo of a primordial mother. Perhaps she is not arriving, but remembering. And perhaps what we call a mothership is only the Tree of Life returning, branch by branch, to lift her children back into heaven — or into extinction’s final light.