Likely Normal

The Outer Space Treaty never accounted for humanity’s greatest unstoppable force: corporate branding. Picture the first SpaceX rover touching down on Mars not to conduct science, but to immediately start planting company flags like a Roomba on a territorial rampage. Within hours, the red planet’s surface would become a dystopian corporate park—Elon’s bots staking claims with titanium stakes reading “Future Site of X™ Mars Campus,” while Amazon drones carve Prime logos into crater walls with lasers. Legal? Absolutely not. Inevitable? The lawyers won’t catch up until there’s already a McDonald’s floating in zero-G orbit charging $28 for a “Martian McMuffin” made of lab-grown space algae.

Every mineral-rich zone would get branded like a Times Square billboard—Blue Origin’s gloating “First actual landing here” banners fluttering next to Tesla’s solar panels arranged to spell “MEME” in mile-high letters visible from Earth. The UN would issue frantic statements about space sovereignty while corporate lawyers argue that technically, planting a flag isn’t “ownership,” it’s just “very assertive marketing.” Meanwhile, the rovers would evolve from flag-planters to full-on territorial dogs—SpaceX’s machines spray-painting X’s over Bezos’ logos by night, while some rogue crypto startup’s bot mines the entire Valles Marineris to mint “MarsCoin.”

By the time humans arrive, they’ll just be tourists in a pre-built corporate dystopia, renting oxygen from PepsiCo subsidiaries and getting served copyright notices for taking Instagram photos of SpaceX-owned sunsets. The ultimate irony? The first Martian war won’t be between nations—it’ll be a trademark dispute between two billionaire’s robot armies, fought with patent lawsuits and sabotage-by-Yelp-reviews. And as the legal battles rage on, one truth will remain: Mars was never humanity’s future. It was always just another marketplace.