Are we taking colonialism to space?
The future has a strange way of arriving with old baggage.
SpaceX may be looking towards Mars, satellites, rockets and space-based artificial intelligence, but Aakash Bramdeo’s latest Anchor Point reflection asks whether humanity’s next frontier is really as new as it looks. Because when the conversation turns from spice to space, from trade routes to planetary routes, from colonial companies to modern corporations, the future begins to sound uncomfortably familiar.
At the centre of the episode is SpaceX’s ambition to expand beyond Earth. Aakash looks at plans linked to Starlink, Starship rockets, AI data centres and the long-term goal of a permanent human settlement on Mars. That idea is already extraordinary, but he makes it feel even more immediate by putting it into local scale: a Mars colony of one million people would be roughly the size of Soweto.
That comparison changes everything.
A million people on Mars is not just a futuristic outpost. It is a society. It would need infrastructure, rules, food, fuel, protection, governance and law. It would need someone to decide who belongs, who leads, who owns and who enforces order. That is where the story stops being only about technology and starts becoming a question of power.
Aakash then draws the episode’s sharpest historical line: SpaceX is being compared with the Dutch East India Company.
The VOC helped create trade routes, raised money from ordinary investors, relied on resupply stations and became one of the most powerful corporate forces of its time. For South Africans, that history is not abstract. It is tied to Jan van Riebeeck, Cape Town and the beginning of a colonial project whose consequences still echo.
So when a modern private company talks about routes, resources and settlement beyond Earth, Aakash asks whether we are witnessing a new kind of frontier, or an old pattern with better rockets.
The question becomes more unsettling when he turns to law and order on Mars. If a settlement has one million people, who polices it? If private companies build the infrastructure, could private security or private armies follow? What happens when corporate power no longer stops at national borders, because the destination is no longer another country, but another planet?
Then comes the moral leap.
If humanity encounters alien life, how should it respond? Do humans observe? Do they help? Do they interfere? Or do they do what colonial powers have done before: arrive, claim, extract and call it progress?
Aakash points to Star Trek’s Prime Directive as a cleaner ethical guide than many real-world systems have managed to provide. Do not interfere in another world’s natural development. Do not use advanced power to shape another society. Do not play God. For cultures that have not discovered advanced technology or life beyond themselves, the instruction is even simpler: stay away.
That may be the most important tension in the episode.
Space exploration is exciting. It could open new possibilities, new resources and new ways of understanding humanity’s place in the universe. But history warns us that exploration and exploitation have often travelled together.
The future may well belong to those bold enough to leave Earth.
The question is whether they will leave behind the worst parts of Earth when they go.
Catch up on all Anchor Point episodes here: https://www.enca.com/anchor-point-we-didnt-vote-adopt-potholes-2-april-2026
(00:00) Spice and space: the past meets the future
(00:21) SpaceX raises billions from ordinary investors
(01:29) Starlink, AI data centres, Starship and Mars
(02:18) A Soweto-sized colony on Mars
(03:04) Why SpaceX is being compared to the VOC
(04:08) Shares, wealth and Elon Musk’s influence
(04:55) Why space travel may need resupply stations
(05:29) Who polices a million people on Mars?
(06:05) Mars, competitors from Earth and alien life
(06:39) Would humans plunder alien life too?
(07:22) What space law says and what it cannot guarantee
(07:51) Why colonial history complicates space ethics
(07:59) Star Trek, the Prime Directive and “don’t play God”
(08:57) Should advanced life simply stay away?
(09:34) The next Columbus, Van Riebeeck or Rhodes in space