“Alienation” (Ink on paper, 9×12 inches)

This is the creative work I came up with as an alternative to doing the multiplexing essay.

This piece is a short original comic I drew that features a human main character, born and raised on an iridium mining colony. I chose iridium as a sought-after resource since it is an extremely rare transition metal on Earth, and of great use in high-performance electronics and engineering. In this piece, she sees Earth in person for the first time, and recalls the perils and costs of space mining through her own experience of being hurt in a mining accident, and having to suffer for two years while her request for a prosthetic moves through a presumed bureaucratic backlog on Earth. When she looks upon the birthplace of her species in the last panel, she does not experience any connection with Earth, contrary to assumption of the beings accompanying her. Space-mining seems like it might be one key motivation in achieving robust space travel at this point in time, and so I attempted to speculate on some unforeseen side-effects of such activity, further down the line. Earth, as the proud home planet of humans, would remain the reason for such resource-gathering, leaving generations of humans on far-flung mining colonies who have never seen Earth, yet support its endless need for resources. In the face of such distance and inequality, I would imagine allegiance to Earth might be difficult to maintain. Considering how often species are named or associated with their home planet in science fiction, I think the breakdown of this implied allegiance is an interesting speculation to pursue within science fiction. At the same time, hopefully I managed to convey (perhaps cynically) that for all humans have advanced in this comic, with implied long-distance space travel and advanced medical equipment, bureaucracy and inequality have endured. Aside from the technology, space-sourced materials, and communication between two sapient species, I hoped to communicate that alienation, even within science fiction, does not require extraordinary means, but perhaps necessitates extraordinary circumstances.