The YouTube on the old Android keeps buffering, the spinning circle freezing mid-sentence as the news anchor talks about rockets and missions to the moon. He speaks of rocket payloads, satellite trajectories, and human missions to the moon.

You lie on the woven coir of the charpai in the courtyard, looking up through the mosquito net. The night sky is thick with heat and the faint, dusty glow of stars.

We are taught to view the cosmos as our ultimate destiny. Space colonization is universally heralded as humanity’s greatest triumph, a way to ensure our survival and write our names across the dark.

In a famous story by the writer Ursula K. Le Guin, there is a city called Omelas. It is a place of absolute joy, ringing with the sound of bells and the laughter of citizens who live without sickness or fear.

But the perfection of Omelas relies on a terrible secret.

In a locked, windowless basement room beneath the city, a single child sits naked in its own filth, enduring constant terror and malnutrition. The happiness of the entire city depends entirely on this one child’s unceasing misery.

Those who find out about the child face a choice. Most stay, accepting the bargain. A few walk away into the mountains, unable to bear the weight of such cruelty.

We look at the night sky and imagine a larger, grander Omelas. But ethical researchers warn us that our cosmic ambitions might hide a cruelty far worse than fiction. They study what are known as s-risks, or risks of astronomical suffering.

If we push life out into the silent universe, we are not just exporting our art and our science. We are exporting our capacity for pain.

Think of the stray dogs fighting over scraps behind the local meat market, or the street cow limping with a plastic bag tangled in its gut. Nature is often romanticized, but it is fundamentally an engine of starvation, disease, and predation.

If we colonize space and seed new planets with biological life, we will inevitably multiply this wild, uncurbed animal suffering on an incomprehensible scale.

And the human cost carries its own shadow. The scholar Phil Torres warns that spreading across the galaxy could lead to unresolvable cosmic wars. Civilizations separated by vast distances, armed with advanced weaponry and differing ideologies, could lock into catastrophic and perpetual conflict.

The philosopher Magnus Vinding calls this the astronomical atrocity problem. He asks a question that sits heavy in the humid air: can any amount of cosmic flourishing ever justify the creation of billions of new beings condemned to extreme suffering?

The researcher Brian Tomasik points out a disturbing truth about our space ambitions. He notes that the fictional city of Omelas is actually a much better scenario than what space colonization truly promises. In Omelas, only one child suffers. In the cosmos we wish to conquer, the basement rooms will be planetary in scale, filled with countless beings enduring unspeakable agony.

The news bulletin ends. You look back up at the red, unblinking dot of Mars.

The sky is no longer just an empty canvas waiting for our arrival. It feels suddenly fragile, like a quiet street just before the arrival of a loud, careless wedding procession.

You lie still in the dark, listening to the night, wondering if the kindest thing we can do for the stars is simply to leave them alone.