6:e året (Year 6) – Spjutet (The Spear)

COMMENT: This title card is the only place in the film that the probe is referred to as The Spear (in Swedish, Spjutet). Otherwise, it is called the probe and variations thereof, but never once as The Spear. That term is reserved for the Martinson poem and then only in the relatively short but potent Canto 53. Further discussions on what the Spear/Probe is and what it means in both mediums is to be found in the essay section titled Meaningless or Meaningful? The Multilevel Nature of the Probe/Spear.

We are shown a section of the exterior of the Aniara, for which again one might be forgiven if they thought they were observing an office building at night.

In this particular area of the massive vessel, there is a long row of rectangular windows lit from the inside with a bluish glow. In six of these center windows, we can just make out one silhouette each.

Directly below these windows, six large grappling claws with active searchlights in their centers emerge from a row of openings. The claws move away from the ship parallel to each other, attached to long flexible cables. As the devices move further into space, the three talons on each claw flower open.

The claws are being operated by the owners of those silhouettes: Six young people standing in front of those windows are manipulating them with small hand controllers. Wearing headsets with microphones, this probe capture team is going through a training exercise, practicing the grappling of the approaching mystery object detected months earlier. The kids, given call signs of A-1 through A-6 for this operation, are led by an older male officer called the Chief Engineer.  

COMMENT: In the film subtitles translating from Swedish to English, this man in charge is labeled Male Pilot when he is speaking, but in fact he is the ship’s Chief Engineer, played by actor Peter Carlberg (born 1950). This character has a much larger role in the 2018 film in terms of screen time than his mentions in the 1956 poem, although an entire canto is dedicated to him for his talent and service in the latter work.

The claw controlled by A-2 starts to wobble. It quickly collides with the other claws to its right, getting entangled in their cables.

“Damn it! What are you doing?” the Chief Engineer shouts in anger. “Want to be stuck here for the rest of your lives?!”

The man orders the simulation to be stopped.

“You just shattered the probe and tore a hole in the craft,” the Chief Engineer chastises A-2 in front of everyone. “We’re all dead. God help us.” The officer stalks away in frustration.

MR is in the same room with the capture team: She tries to soothe the situation.

“We just need to keep practicing,” MR recommends to the young men and women.

Sadly, the Chief Engineer is not done with his harsh commentary.

“And you’re supposed to be our best? Unbelievable,” he insults the whole crew. “Do it again! Goddamn it!”

Mercifully, our scenery switches to the day of the Aniara encountering the “emergency fuel probe” as Chefone called it. 

MR and Isagel’s child, now a toddler, walks along a wood-paneled corridor, cooing happily. His parents watch the young boy as they follow after him. Isagel smiles at her son, while MR looks around with an expression of concern on her face. They reach their child and Isagel picks him up, playfully tossing the toddler into the air a few times.

Chebeba meets up with the couple, looking a bit disheveled and tired. MR tells their babysitter it is “not okay to be this late today,” for which the woman apologizes while taking the boy. MR and Isagel then head off for their respective duties as part of the probe encounter and recovery effort.

Elsewhere in the massive ship, people are milling about in an open public area, watching and waiting for the probe to arrive. The Astronomer, Roberta Twelander, is among the passengers, where she talks excitedly about her discovery with them. She is neatly dressed in her crew uniform: The Astronomer is also clearly sober and shines with a renewed enthusiasm.

The Astronomer begins conversing with two young women in her sphere of influence. They politely inform the scientist that they do not understand her Swedish and only speak English, to which Roberta immediately accommodates them about what will soon happen with the approaching probe.

Isagel is seen by herself staring out a large window as Chefone gets on the PA system. She is not quite in her officer uniform yet.

“This is your Captain Chefone,” he informs the entire ship. “We will soon begin docking, so we ask you to return to your cabins.”

As the passengers obey him en masse, Chefone explains why they need to secure themselves.

“To slow down the probe, artificial gravity levels may have to be increased up to seven or nine g.”

We are taken to the probe reception team, which includes MR, who are wearing full body light blue hazmat, or hazardous materials, suits. The group lays face up on the hard deck of the receiving area to better deal with the predicted increased gravitational forces. This team is led by the Chief Engineer, who bears a crucifix: He crosses himself before laying back.

Thin rows of blue light emanate from the Aniara towards the approaching craft, spreading a shimmering halo of blue-white light. The cylindrical probe arrives and enters the much larger ship’s extended artificial gravity field, giving the strange vessel an elongated appearance as it passes through.

Once the Aniara’s gravity levels are neutralized, the blue halo disappears. On cue, the six grappling claws exit the ship and smoothly glide towards the probe, monitored by the officers on the bridge, who are strapped into their seats.

Just seconds apart, the half-dozen metal hands seize on to the object, dimmed in appearance by the surrounding darkness of deep space. Secured onto their target, the claw cables tighten, and the probe is carefully reeled into the Aniara.

From a viewscreen, the reception team watches the probe being delivered on a wheeled platform into the cargo hold. The team enters the hold from a hatchway; as a further precaution, they are now wearing breathing masks. 

At last, we clearly see what has held the attention and hopes of the Aniara passengers through the last year, thanks to the bright fluorescent lights of the holding bay…

The probe is a long silver metal object with an aerodynamic – pointed – nosecone, thin seamed sectioned areas spread evenly along its body, and no visible signs of either identification markings or any damage. As Isagel had stated fourteen months earlier, the probe is 100 meters long and two meters wide, or 328 feet long and 6.5 feet wide, for those still unaccustomed to the metric system.

COMMENT: For a comparison, this probe is only a matter of yards shorter than the length of the real Saturn 5 rocket that took humans to the Moon with the Apollo program: That rocket was 363 feet, 8 inches long, or almost 111 meters. For decades, the Saturn 5 ranked among the largest and most powerful rockets ever built by humanity. One cannot help but wonder why someone built such a relatively large vessel, for what purpose, and how it ended up in the depths of space in the vicinity of the Aniara.

The mysterious probe/spear sitting in a large cargo hold of the Aniara after its successful capture. Will it be the salvation of the desperate passengers and crew that Captain Chefone promised months earlier? This is Aniara: Take a guess.[/caption]

The team walk along the length of the probe, inspecting its hull. Then the men and women stop at a certain point along the vessel to set up their analytical equipment to start examining their visitor. One person uses a special hand-held device to scan the hull for radiation: The instrument projects a small blue grid of light as it moves across the probe’s surface.

As one team member attempts to drill into the probe’s metal hull, the team leader reports out loud that they are “only getting a read on the cosmic radiation” – likely from exposure to cosmic rays traveling through space – and not any ionized particle energy transmissions from inside the vessel. This is what they would likely be detecting if the probe contained nuclear fuel rods, as they all hope.

“Listen up!” the Chief Engineer calls out. “Pack up our analytical instruments, all of them. We need to report to Chefone now.”

The members of the team obey their leader – except for The Astronomer, who is still busy looking at something through a microscope.

“You, too! Hey!” the leader shouts at The Astronomer as the rest start walking away. “We need to report to the Captain.”

“Quiet, I’m busy,” the scientist responds, without even bothering to look up from her microscope. 

The Chief Engineer becomes insistent, but MR steps in.

“Leave her. She’s more useful here.”

The rest of the team leaves. One of MR’s students, a young man with a crewcut named Tivo, stares at The Astronomer as he walks behind and past her.

We meet up with the reception team in that small conference room where Chefone apparently prefers to meet with his officers. 

“Neither the initial spectral analyses nor the goptic-STEM could determine the elemental composition,” explains the Chief Engineer about the probe. 

Tivo, who is sitting next to the probe team leader at the conference table, speaks up next.

““It’s not necessarily an issue,” Tivo adds. “I mean, our method of measuring may be… out of date.” MR, sitting on the other side of Tivo, nods in agreement.

“Maybe we shouldn’t have said it’s a rescue probe?” The Intendent offers to his superior.

“Have you seen what that information has done?” counters Chefone. “How motivated everyone has become. We should have said it was coming long before we even knew it was coming!”

Chefone then focuses his attention back to the team leader.

“So, we’re not ruling out that it can contain fuel?” he asks the older man.

“Absolutely not,” the Chief Engineer responds, taking off his glasses. “Probably the material itself can be turned radioactive… though we don’t know exactly how. But we’ll find a solution.”

Miracle and Chance

We travel next to a very different scene and a brief time later: A miniature golf course with a very artificial background, complete with equally artificial birdsong to roughly simulate terrestrial nature. MR is sitting on the ground as she plays with her toddler while Isagel watches them seated in a chair. The two women also spend a happy intimate moment together as a couple.

Their family time complete, MR, Isagel, and the child in the pilot’s arms are walking towards a restaurant. MR sees The Astronomer sitting at the bar holding a glass with alcohol, her head on the counter. 

COMMENT: I caught another brief continuity error in this scene: At the bar, The Astronomer has her chin resting on the bar counter in closeup. However, right before and after this view, when we see The Astronomer at some distance when MR is first approaching her, the scientist has her head up and is leaning it against her left hand. The scene changes here are too quick for The Astronomer to have changed her positions so fast.

“I need to get her home,” says MR to Isagel about her former cabinmate.

“Of course,” Isagel replies and starts walking off with their son, who runs slightly ahead of his mother.

As MR approaches The Astronomer, it is obvious that the older woman has taken up drinking again.

“Hello? Time to go home?” MR says encouragingly to her friend.

The Astronomer looks up first at the Mimarobe and then to her receding toddler, smiling at the sight.

“How’s his vocabulary coming?” the scientist asks of MR’s child. “Is he learning anything? Has he mentioned spiral galaxies?”

Staying focused, MR tries to escort The Astronomer out of the bar.

“Come on, let’s go.”

“No,” The Astronomer balks. “Why?”

“We need to get to work in a few hours. It’s important!” answers MR.

“It’s a goddamn waste of time,” returns The Astronomer, who suddenly turns to a random male passenger sitting near her at the bar.

“Hey!” she shouts to the patron. “Do you believe in the probe?” The man just stares at The Astronomer.

“Cut it out!” demands MR. “You can’t act like this in public! Come!”

Taking The Astronomer by the arm, MR is able to escort the inebriated scientist out of the bar. It is then that we notice how far The Astronomer has relapsed: She is not wearing any pants, only some black underwear covered by fishnet stockings.

COMMENT: As one reviewer of Aniara said, it is both amazing and amusing that the alcohol has managed to last after all this time with so many people onboard from what was supposed to be a three-week trip. Unless someone has figured out how to distill new batches of these liquids from the algae? 

Sometime later back at the probe, we see the investigation team still trying to wrest secrets from the object. The once pristine hull of the probe is now marred with several circular scars where the team tried to drill through its skin, presumably without success.

“Let’s take a twenty-minute break,” declares the Chief Engineer. No one argues with him as they abandon their work stations.

MR tells the team leader that the probe “is a revolutionary discovery” whatever else may come from their efforts. 

“It’s a miracle,” the Chief Engineer agrees. “If only we could extract some data.”

MR sweeps up some shattered glass created by several dark brown test tubes that were accidentally dropped on the deck earlier. 

Having heard their conversation, The Astronomer walks up to the Chief Engineer and MR.

“Did you say it was a miracle?” the scientist inquires. “Don’t you know that ‘miracle’ and ‘chance’ come from the same source?”

COMMENT: Although I could find no linguistic evidence that the words “miracle” and “chance” come from the same source, this line of thought by The Astronomer is taken from Canto 47 of the Martinson poem: 

A philosopher, or “numerosopher” as author Martinson cleverly calls him, of “number-groups” and a “mystic of the aleph-number school” brings data cards to Isagel to feed into the ship’s computer, “the Gopta-works”. 

The numerosopher wants to know how often miracles occur in the Universe via mathematics: Perhaps a miracle will take place that can return the Aniara home.

The philosopher soon has his answer as shown in Canto 47…

The question dealt with “rate of miracle”

in the Cosmos mathematically conceived.

It seems to coincide so much with chance

that chance and miracle must have one source;

one answer seems to do for either force.

And Dr. Quantity (we use that phrase)

makes a silent bow, resigned to grief,

and tiptoes down Aniara’s passageways.

The numerosopher was also searching for what he hoped was a hidden design and therefore meaning in and of the Cosmos. He has hardly been alone in this endeavor: 

Pythagoras of Samos (circa 570 to circa 495 BCE) was an ancient Greek philosopher (the first man to give himself this title) who made many mathematical and scientific discoveries (or perhaps his contemporary colleagues or earlier wise men were the ones who deserve the real credit) but then went beyond into metaphysics, using math to find deeper patterns in nature, which may or may not have actually existed. 

The many teachings of Pythagoras influenced such notables as astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) whose studies of the heavens brought him to conclude among other things that God was the Ultimate Geometer and that the planets moved in elliptical solar orbits that made harmonic musical patterns, the “music of the spheres.” 

Another was Sir Issac Newton (1642-1727) who used mathematics to find numerical “codes” or messages from God in the Bible. You can read more about this aspect of Newton’s life and work in the section of this essay titled Aniara… the Comedy Series about the television series Avenue 5.

Sadly, for the Aniara’s resident philosopher, his computations of universal miracles and chances concluded that they both came from the same source, where “one answer seems to do for either force.” In existentialism, since everything is already considered an absurdity and a product of chance, any and all aspects of life which merely exist can be declared a miracle. Thus, the inability for us to tell the difference between the two concepts.

As The Astronomer speaks, she briefly grasps the worn silver crucifix chained around the Chief Engineer’s neck.

“Okay, that’s great,” interjects MR, trying to avoid the confrontation she sees coming.

The Astronomer dismisses her friend and colleague with a handwave and continues focusing her conversation on the team leader.

“That thing showing up has nothing to do with us,” she declares. “It’s chance. Devoid of any meaning.”

The scientist looks at the crucifix around the older man’s neck and grabs it again, holding it up to his face.

“What’s this?” The Astronomer asks, knowing full well what it is. “What is this thing? You think it’ll save you?” she says with a mocking laugh.

The Chief Engineer becomes very agitated with The Astronomer and tries to pull away from her.

“Let go!” he demands, his aggressive side rising to the surface.

“So hit me!” The Astronomer dares him.

MR tries to physically intervene, but the two adversaries remain focused on each other.

“Why don’t you hit me?” The Astronomer demands again. They start to struggle, and the Chief Engineer does attempt to strike her. The scene is cut away before we see any more of this particular breakdown in order.

We Came from Earth, from Dorisland

Tensions among the residents of the Aniara are also brewing in other areas of the ship…

Just outside the probe holding area, two ship officers are trying to restrain a small mob of passengers who are frustrated from receiving no news regarding the probe and are demanding answers. One person even asks why the ship hasn’t turned around yet, as Chefone had clearly and deliberately said in his announcement that the vessel was an “emergency fuel probe.”

One man breaches the restriction rope and is tasered by the woman officer. The man falls to the deck, screaming in pain from the electrical jolts. Surprised at this, the woman declares aloud to her partner that the taser’s power level “wasn’t even cranked up that high!”

The male officer waves his taser wildly at the rest of the encroaching mob, threatening to use his weapon on them. The passengers back up in fear, not wanting to join the man still writhing on the ground from his “encounter” with the taser.

Returning to the focus of this agitation, we find The Astronomer seemingly asleep against a column in the probe holding bay. She is now wearing a dark green sweater over the top half of her protective blue suit. 

With the sound of drilling in the background, Chefone and The Intendent walk up to the scientist, who is unaware and uncaring of their presence.

“What are you doing?” Chefone demands of The Astronomer, who remains sitting on the deck with her eyes closed and doesn’t bother to answer him.

“You’ll be receiving an award for your discovery tonight,” Chefone informs The Astronomer.

At this news, the scientist becomes a bit more alert. 

“Award?” she asks. “So, you’re going to use it as a prize?”

“You’re not going to spread any fear,” Chefone warns her. He then turns to the rest of the team.

“Listen up,” orders Chefone. The entire team stops what they are doing and looks at their captain.

“We’ve all had high hopes for this object,” Chefone begins. “And until we have certainty, we don’t say anything. The last thing we want is for people to lose hope. So tonight, I’ll say everything is going as planned. And we’ll need to present a united front. Is that clear?”

The team nods in agreement with Chefone, including MR. 

The Astronomer gets up from the deck, groaning in the process of having to move. 

“We are in a sarcophagus… a coffin,” she declares defiantly. “That’s all we know with certainty.” The scientist starts to walk away from Chefone and the rest of the probe team.

Chefone is furious with The Astronomer’s blatant insubordination.

“I won’t have that tone!” Chefone shouts after her.

“I won’t have any hypocrisy,” The Astronomer fires back, not even bothering to turn around as she continues to exit the holding bay.

“You’re not spreading any rumors this time!”

Chefone grabs a taser from the holster of the fellow officer nearest to him and shoots The Astronomer in the back. The woman cries out only once from the impact of the electrified darts and then collapses to the deck with a heavy thud. The Astronomer lies still. 

Everyone freezes in shock at what has just occurred. Even Chefone doesn’t respond at first. Then The Intendent and another burly officer pick up The Astronomer and remove her from the hold, carrying her limp form past the probe and the scientist’s one-time hope.

Having died from the effects of the tasering, The Astronomer is given a funeral service. Her body lays wrapped in a white sheet upon a large table draped in a black cloth. At each corner of this table stands one tall, lit candle on the floor. A selection of people surrounds the scientist in mourning: These members include the Mimarobe, Isagel, and Chefone.

With a large image of The Astronomer projected on one wall of the room, MR reads a poem as part of her eulogy to her coworker and friend. It is, in fact, a verbatim reading of Canto 79 from the Martinson poem.

“I knew she wrote…” MR begins. “But not that she wrote poems.”

MR reads aloud The Astronomer’s writings from her bound paper journal:

We came from Earth, from Dorisland, the gem in our solar system.

The only orb where life could grow, a land of milk and honey.

Describe the landscapes we found there, the days which there dawned.

Describe the man who sewed the garb for the funeral of his spawn, till God and Satan hand in hand through a ravaged, poisoned land took to hills, fled up and down from man: A king with ashen crown.

As the last line of the poem is being read, The Astronomer’s shrouded mortal coil is shown being ejected from the Aniara into space. From a distance, her remains resemble a small bright dot moving through the starry void. 

MR watches The Astronomer silently drift off in the direction of the Milky Way center. The ultimate fate of the older woman’s remains is unknown, but she herself would probably have said it doesn’t matter. At the very least, The Astronomer will truly be among the stars she knew and loved, and not left in the ship she ruefully called “a sarcophagus… a coffin.”

COMMENTS: The Astronomer’s funeral mirrors the Chief Engineer’s singular event described in Canto 78. A valued and popular person in the epic poem, the Chief Engineer requested that his body be sent from the Aniara in a “rescue-module” towards the bright blue supergiant star Rigel, also known as Beta Orionis, the foot in the constellation of Orion the Hunter.

It is interesting to realize the following facts about Rigel, even though this BA-class sun is not the apparent celestial direction that The Astronomer was sent in the film: 

The star type that Rigel belongs to is noted for burning very brightly and being relatively short-lived compared to other stellar classes. Perhaps this is why Martinson chose Rigel, to reflect both the vaunted life of the Chief Engineer and the human species overall: Compared to the age of the Cosmos, we have very brief lives that often shine for a bit, then burn out much too soon. 

The ancient Egyptians believed that Rigel was the bright star which guided the souls of the departed to Osiris, their god of the underworld and rebirth, where the deserving ones would attain eternal life. Martinson not only peppered his poem with names from mythological deities such as those from ancient Egypt, the poet also felt, as one will find in the last canto, that humanity would only find final peace and redemption in the presumed realm after this one.

In the film version, the Chief Engineer was one of the few prominent characters who openly displayed his Christian religious belief and not an ancient Egyptian or a ship-born cult.

This is Our Punishment

After the funeral, we find the Mimarobe in her bathroom, looking rather disheveled. She grabs a small white square among a few others on a small purple rectangular plate, perhaps one of the job assignment cards given to her and Isagel when they were released from the ship’s brig. The little white square has a blue dot in its center, a hallucinogenic narcotic which the poem calls opium. MR puts it in her mouth and wipes her nose.

MR stares into the bathroom mirror. The drug causes the Mimarobe to hallucinate: MR sees a vision of The Astronomer, alive and standing in a forest in winter. The scientist has a knowing smile on her face. Then suddenly, the surrounding trees are burning and melting.

We see that Chebeba and Daisi Doody have joined MR and Isagel in their quarters; all are getting high off that same drug.

Chebeba says aloud what she remembers about one of the many disasters that befell the planet Earth; perhaps the one which left her scarred.

“It was during autumn time. Stones were glazed. All that could burn turned to ash.”

“This is our punishment,’ Chebeba then declares about being trapped onboard the Aniara. “I’m living through my own funeral.” Daisi just laughs at her comments.

Chebeba screams wildly like a banshee: This awakens the toddler, who starts to cry from the commotion. As Isagel tries to console her young son, she warns their sometimes babysitter.

“If you’re going to scream, you need to leave!”

Chebeba fluctuates between laughing maniacally and sobbing.

“I don’t want to live here,” Chebeba cries.

Daisi has decided to leave this little party. MR smiles at Daisi, then gets up off the floor and begs him not to go. 

“Daisi, Daisi Doody!” MR calls out to her brief, one-time partner. “Don’t go! Wait, I’m coming with you. I want to dance!”

The pair arrive at the discotheque where they first met. On the dance floor, Daisi beckons MR to dance with him to a new techno beat, which she accepts. Soon they are dancing wildly together and even making out. We see them through their drug-induced haze.

Outside, the band of the Milky Way seems to have somehow transformed into a strange shade of mauve. However, it is not those stars themselves that have changed: Instead, the tiny black visage of the Aniara is encountering a pale purple, pink-tinged cloud of unknown origin and composition.

The mysterious cloud envelopes the spaceship. Many passengers are simply staring out the windows in wonder at it. One elderly man, wearing glasses but lacking a shirt, starts slamming the palms of his hands frantically against the window, as if he is trying to get the attention of this massive alien visitor.

COMMENT: In poem Canto 69, Martinson mentions that some elderly ship passengers were hoping this cloud had come to destroy them all and put an end to their long suffering. Was this shirtless man a representation of the desire by those like him wanting their trapped lives to be over?

As this goes on, MR and Daisi are still in the discotheque, dancing to the same techno beat, oblivious to everything else. Suddenly the ship rumbles and vibrates, knocking the couple to the floor. Unafraid and unaware due to their drugged state, the two only laugh together in response.

The cloud now reveals large pieces of debris throughout its foggy interior, which begin striking the Aniara. A pilot officer gets on the PA system and orders the passengers to “return immediately to your cabins and fasten your seat belts!” The gawking crowds begin to run and scream in panic as their vessel shakes even more violently.

In one of the smaller bars, The Intendent is ordering the people around him to get back to their cabins and buckle up. The fellow we saw much earlier in their voyage who was wearing the man-sized duck costume – and still is, only he has unzipped himself out of the top half – comes up to the tall officer and asks him what is happening.

“The bow shock is killing all our equipment,” The Intendent responds, then pushes the man out of the bar with the words “Run… birdie!”

We witness the passengers who could not make it back to their cabins in time being thrown about the corridors and down stairwells. 

In the discotheque, Daisi Doodi is flung across the room and slams against a wall, where he falls to the floor unmoving. At that same moment, the passing cloud disappears and the Aniara stops shaking.

Already on the floor, MR slowly gets up: With expressions of awareness and realization on her face, she runs out of the dance hall and unsteadily half-crawls up some enclosed stairs. The Mimarobe passes by an officer lying face down and unmoving; an alarm klaxon blares repeatedly in the background.

COMMENT 1 of 2: While we learn almost nothing about the composition of this cloud in the film, Martinson’s poem describes it in Canto 69 as a “fog-bank” and “a cosmic sand-cloud” composed of “cosmic granules or of ice” that has been traveling for eons as “an everlasting snow/ floating around for several billion years/ and searching for its mount/ to settle on…” 

COMMENT 2 of 2: Of the five real deep space probes we have sent into the interstellar regions since the 1970s, none have thankfully encountered any type of large particle cloud of the kind the Aniara comes across, if such objects even exist. However, space itself is vast and there is still so much we do not know about even the nearer realms just beyond our Sol system. To give one relevant and recent real-world example:

In late 2023, the New Horizons probe, which made the first flyby mission of Pluto and its moons in 2015, reported detecting an unexpected increase in free-floating dust far beyond the planetary edges of our Sol system, in the region of space where the Kuiper Belt Objects (KBO) dwell. While these dust grains were certainly not big enough to disrupt the spacecraft, such scientific evidence gives us more proof that we are only beginning to learn what exists in the wider Milky Way galaxy.

She Calls Out to Me

MR rushes into her cabin, where she finds her toddler calmly sitting in his playpen and drinking from his bottle. Isagel is nearby, wearing her pajamas and perched up in the bottom arcing curve of one of their room windows, just staring into space. 

MR first cradles the head of her son, then almost crawls over to her partner, kissing and hugging Isagel while staying on her knees, apologizing profusely for running off with Daisi.

Isagel continues to focus her attention out their window. Then she says something strange.

“She calls out to me.”

MR sits back on her legs, perplexed.

“Who?”

“She cries out to me,” answers Isagel “but she calls me by another name.”

“Listen to me, Isagel,” says MR. “You’re high. But you’ll come down.”

Just then the young boy calls out “Mama” and MR turns her attention to him, embracing their son and laughing a bit in relief. Isagel remains at her vigil by the window.

After the Storm

We are made involuntary witnesses to the state of the Aniara after the cosmic particle storm…

On the concourse, rows of white bedsheets cover the bodies of the many victims of the encounter laid to temporary rest there. On a nearby bench, Chefone and the Chief Engineer sit together, surveying the aftermath. Chefone’s right arm is in a sling. 

“Make sure to gather sheets… and clothes,” Chefone orders to the Chief Engineer of the sight before them; he gets up from the bench and responds with a simple “Yeah.”

The Chief Engineer walks over to the nearest body and lifts its covering sheet. He discovers The Intendent, staring straight ahead at nothing and crowned with a bloody head wound. Another sheet removal reveals the mortal coil of the young student Tivo, whose eyes also remain open.

Our cinematic tour takes us to the holding bay, where the once hoped-for “emergency fuel probe” now sits in semi-darkness, clearly abandoned. The probe’s formerly shiny metal hull is now dirty and scarred with multiple circles where the probe inspection team tried and failed to wrest its interior secrets. Even the deck below this mystery object is covered with various debris.

We see what happens with the bedsheets and clothes collected by the Chief Engineer from the particle cloud victims: A representative washing machine is shown dutifully cleaning some of the clothes and sheets, where they are then dried, pressed, and folded by at least two women attendants. Few of the ship’s resources can be wasted these days.

QUESTION: Were the bodies of the many victims from the particle cloud incident merely dumped unceremoniously naked into deep space, without even so much as a sheet to shroud them in? Considering that their clothes and the sheets were salvaged due to their need, plus the fact that the surviving passengers have been subsisting on reconstituted algae for years, I toyed with the idea that some of the dead may have ended up being consumed rather than given wholly to the void: The survivors have undoubtedly been desiring a change of fare for quite some time, and, as there have been no views or even mentions of any gardens or livestock onboard the vessel, I had to wonder if at least some of the passengers considered it. 

There are solid examples from real life where people on various ill-fated voyages resorted to cannibalism when their situation became desperate. For the record, I could find no mention of such an act in the epic poem, either after the storm or anywhere else in the work. This is a bit surprising, as Martinson did portray some of the passengers performing rather barbaric acts that were not transcribed into the film, such as human sacrifices, and I had to wonder if cannibalism might be among them.

We find ourselves back in the old Mima Hall where MR and two young assistants are finally able to work on building the beam screen. MR’s toddler, whose name is never revealed to us, is also there so she can keep an eye on him. 

The young boy is naturally interested in what his mother is doing, but MR asks him to go play with his toys. Instead, the child grabs a black cylinder off a work bench next to the beam screen device. The cylinder slips from his little hands and falls to the floor, causing the toddler to reach for it.

“No, no, no!” MR shouts to her son, whisking the device away from him. “You cannot play with that! It’s very dangerous.”

The startled boy starts to cry. MR apologies to him and cradles him in her arms. Realizing the child may also be tired, she tells her assistants they are going home while praising them for the job they have done so far on the beam screen.

Mother and son reach their cabin, where MR lets the boy activate the door’s automatic lock. As they enter, Isagel gets up from their bed and greets them with a forced smile. The former ship’s pilot is garbed in her silk pajamas.

MR places the tired toddler in his playpen and covers him with a blanket before moving off to the bathroom to brush her teeth.

COMMENT: This personal care ritual we have seen MR perform multiple times is a smart habit not only for general dental hygiene, but also for the likely condition that there are no professional dentists onboard the Aniara. However, how long can or did the supply of toothpaste last on the ship? If their toothpaste is already gone, what are the passengers and crew using for a substitute?

Isagel gets on her knees next to the playpen and looks at her toddler; she is clearly distressed. The one-time pilot rubs her son’s cheek as he sleeps. Then Isagel stands up, looks at the toddler for a bit longer, and crawls back into bed. 

MR watches her partner and son through an adjacent bathroom window that has a view of their bedroom. The Mimarobe then briefly emerges while still brushing her teeth to tell her companion that she is “on the verge” of making the beam screen work.

“That’s great. Congratulations,” replies Isagel with a smile but limited enthusiasm.

MR finishes up her dental hygiene and runs out of the bathroom to playfully belly flop on the bed next to Isagel, smiling at her.

“What’s wrong?” MR inquires of her partner, acknowledging Isagel’s despondent mood at last.

Looking quietly at MR, Isagel tells her mate that she is “so talented.”

“At brushing my teeth?” MR jokes back.

At that, Isagel smiles and reaches out to rub the corners of MR’s mouth with her left thumb.

“It’s like you can’t be sad,” Isagel tells MR. With that comment, MR makes an exaggerated sad face, drooping her mouth and chin downwards. This makes MR laugh at her own antics after a moment, as Isagel smiles back and laughs just a bit.

“I admire you. How you persevere,” Isagel tells MR with genuine feeling.

“Wait till you see the result,” MR informs Isagel about the beam screen. “I want you both to be proud of me.”

MR lays her head lovingly against Isagel’s chest. Nearby, in his playpen, their toddler stirs a bit in his sleep.

I Want It to be a Paradise…

We return to the old Mima Hall, where MR and her small staff are readying the beam screen. The former Mimarobe is making adjustments on the projector device.

“Should I go with another image?” MR asks one of her assistants, who is standing next to a small monitor screen on a nearby wall, studying it.

The young woman shakes her head and tells MR that “this one’s great. Really.” MR asks her again and the assistant confirms her statement.

“God, I don’t know why I’m so nervous,” MR says out loud, making some final adjustments. “I want it to be a paradise…”

Finished, MR stands up, giving the equipment one final look over before turning to her assistant.

“Let’s do it,” MR orders. “Turn it on.”

The brunette assistant wipes her finger down the wall screen panel to activate the beam screen. Through the open door of the Mima Hall entrance, they can see a bright green glow coming from the adjacent concourse. The assistant smiles at MR and they both walk out together to see their results.

Just outside the Aniara, two massive panoramas of a beautiful terrestrial waterfall streaming down a rock face border either side of the spaceship, dwarfing it in their size. The projections blot out the surrounding stars with their blue-green glow.

Some of the passengers are shown quietly looking in wonder at the sight just beyond their vessel, bathed in its colors: An older man, an elderly woman, and a young mother holding her toddler son.

Her task accomplished, MR heads back to her cabin. As she walks through a hallway “garnished” with clothes strung across a laundry line and a black trash bag on the floor along her path, MR stops to ask a passenger she sees in a cabin with their door open if they have observed the beam screen image and what they think of it. 

An unseen man responds that “it’s nice”, to which MR naturally agrees. The Mimarobe informs this person that she can change the images as well before continuing her journey home with a near bounce in her steps.

Reaching her cabin door at last, MR goes to open it to tell Isagel of her good news. However, she has trouble trying to enter her home: The door seems to have a weight on the other side, blocking it.

MR pounds her fist on the door, calling out for her partner. Finally, MR uses her hip to help force open the thick wooden door just enough so she can slip in. 

Isagel is sitting in a slumped stance at the base of the cabin entrance. A cloth bathrobe belt is wrapped around Isagel’s neck at one of its ends and the interior door handle at the other. 

MR screams and swears at Isagel in shock, then lays her on the floor and starts compressing Isagel’s chest, trying to revive her. Isagel’s open eyes merely stare upwards at nothing. MR leans in to see if Isagel is breathing but receives no response.

Whimpering and panting hard, MR stands up, where she suddenly begins to look around for their toddler. Neither seeing nor hearing him in their bedroom, MR dashes to the bathroom, where she discovers that Isagel has drowned their son in the bathtub.

As MR screams and wails in emotional agony off screen, the camera shows four toy dolls laid out next to each other on their bed, arranged by Isagel as a final act. 

Isagel continues to lay motionless on the floor, staring but not staring at the ceiling, while the unearthly green glow of the beam screen light shines through their room’s circular window.

MR exits the bathroom carrying their child, whom she has wrapped in a towel. MR kneels next to Isagel and with one hand begins tugging on her companion’s robe, begging her over and over to get up.

10:e året (Year 10) – Jubiléet (The Jubilee)

Four years have passed since the Mimarobe created the beam screen and then subsequently lost her family. We find Captain Chefone looking at himself in a mirror, wearing his officer’s uniform and preening. Strange throbbing atonal music plays somewhere in the background while Chefone prepares himself.

In the Light Year Hall, there are a scattering of passengers in attendance in the audience seats radiating out and upwards from the stage. A DJ is at the podium on stage operating some controls: He is the source of the subdued techno tones that border on being white noise. MR is sitting there with the other people, alone, staring ahead without enthusiasm.

There is a final tone, and the DJ finishes his musical performance to scattered applause. On cue, Chefone walks out onto the stage from a side door. The Aniara name and logo in white swirls about on the large dark screen behind the two men, each letter of the ship’s name spinning once in turn repeatedly.

Standing in the middle of the stage, his figure enhanced by a distant spotlight, Chefone looks at the silent reduced gathering.

“Punt and Tyrus,” he begins, without extrapolation. “Vinland and Da Gama. NASA and Aniara. We are pioneers who have gone further into space than anyone before us. That’s worth a round of applause.” 

The audience responds to Chefone’s cue, although their clapping is somewhat weaker for Chefone and his words than what they had just given to the DJ with his artistic performance. The camera also fixes on MR, who remains still in her seat, although the facial muscles in her jaw twitch reflexively when Chefone says the name Aniara.

COMMENT 1 of 3: Chefone is referring to the following in his speech: Punt was an ancient African kingdom which the equally ancient Egyptians sent multiple trade expeditions to. Tyrus was the chief city of the ancient Phoenicians, who were renowned for being great maritime sailors and explorers. Vinland was the name given to the modern Canadian provinces of Newfoundland and New Brunswick, which the Vikings explored and briefly settled around 1000 CE. Vasco da Gama (circa 1460–1524) was a Portuguese explorer who became the first man to successfully navigate a sea route from Europe to Asia. NASA is the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the American space agency founded two years after the release of Martinson’s epic poem. I am pretty certain I do not have to explain Chefone’s mention of Aniara here at this point.

COMMENT 2 of 3: These first four names come directly from poem Canto 99. However, there they were spoken not by Captain Chefone, but rather an unnamed passenger gone insane, who is giving a final lecture to those few survivors around him. Both men attempt to put an optimistic spin on their deep space journey, although the mad man soon openly realizes these facts have no substantive meaning to what is left of their lives – and not just because most of his audience is quite literally dead.

COMMENT 3 of 3: I find it rather interesting that the first three classical places and the one historical person’s name mentioned by Martinson and repeated in the film all involve exploration that was primarily conducted for trading goods and territorial expansion. In other words, they existed for and due to material gain, as opposed to exploration primarily for the advancement of human knowledge and enlightenment. 

Aniara was built not to explore the celestial realm, but rather to rescue portions of the human population from a ravaged Earth to live on Mars. The passengers onboard are civilian refugees, not trained astronauts. No scientific data from their journey into the far reaches of space was expected from the ship’s crew, and not just because they were technically unable to communicate with the rest of humanity back in the inner Sol system. 

Perhaps this is why Chefone did not mention any of the first five space probes to leave our Sol system and enter interstellar space: Pioneer 10 and 11, Voyager 1 and 2, and New Horizons. They were and are missions of pure science and technology that have returned priceless in situ data about regions of the Final Frontier we would have known far less about otherwise. 

These robotic vessels also managed to function for decades beyond their initial designs, largely due to being both non-organic and nuclear-powered. Perhaps Chefone realized that bringing them up could possibly demoralize his passengers even more if they made any reflective comparisons between those deep space probes and themselves.

Chefone follows his own request and claps along with the crowd, putting his hands together a bit longer and louder after everyone else has stopped.

“I would now like to hand out an honorary medal,” Chefone announces next. “May I ask you, MR, to come up on stage?”

MR rises from her seat and steps down some adjacent stairs towards Chefone. The audience applause for the former Mimarobe is even weaker than their previous hand claps.

MR stands before Chefone. He takes out a large round medal attached to a blue sash from his right jacket pocket and places it around MR’s neck. She gives him a brief nod of acknowledgement in return. Chefone swivels back to the gathered audience to speak again.

“MR is awarded the Aniara Honorary Medal for her beam screen, which has helped us remember our origins and transported us to glittering waterfalls, wonderful pine forests, and glorious summer meadows.”

This scene of MR being given an award for her beam screen by Captain Chefone says all you need to know on how things are going with the remaining folks aboard the Aniara ten years into their “mission” through deep space.

As Chefone talks, MR looks over her captain: A rough yellow tourniquet is wrapped around his right wrist and hand. Dried blood stains much of it. 

The audience makes one more effort at applause as Chefone ends his little speech. 

QUESTIONS: Who physically made this “honorary” medal for MR? Does this Aniara have the facilities for such metal work and design? It could, I suppose, as even our International Space Station (ISS) possesses a 3-D printer to make certain tools and parts for the resident astronauts. 

Does the medal actually commemorate what Chefone is using it for (our brief views of this object show nothing clearly beyond its shape and color)? Does any of this really matter at this point in the story? Is this formal recognition of MR’s work a strong sign that Chefone and whoever is left in authority have given up on the younger students figuring out ways to get back to Mars, since the beam screen has been allowed?

COMMENT: Our collective society has an entire historical industry around awards for nearly every conceivable achievement, for we so crave to be recognized and rewarded by others. Aniara has shown the ultimate hollowness of these awards: They are little more than self-congratulatory actions to make ourselves feel better emotionally and, more importantly, improve our social and material status among the rest of the herd. On a dying spaceship with a slowly expiring crew so far from home without a destination in sight, any award is at best a psychological band aid. Otherwise, it is just a painful reminder of all they have lost that once mattered.

After the ceremony, we see the Mimarobe walking back with the rest of the crowd down a nondescript corridor. No one is smiling, talking, or interacting in any meaningful way with anyone else. Their actions are reminiscent of the kind one sees in a group of zombies in a typical film of that horror genre. 

COMMENT: I was also reminded of the scenes in the great German science fiction film Metropolis (1927) directed by Fritz Lang (1890-1976), where the working class are shown early on trudging off to and from their strenuous jobs deep under the immense main city, almost as if they are automatons: No facial expressions and no interactions among themselves, just a slow and steady march towards their prescribed fates.

MR enters her now long empty cabin. We see clothes scattered haphazardly about the room. MR halts her steps just long enough to remove the medal hanging from around her neck and lets it drop to the floor with a dull thud. MR then faces her bed and crawls on top of it, where she lays face down and does not move.

As the camera lingers on MR’s prone form, we hear water dripping in the background. The sound is coming from a leaking faucet in the bathroom. Dirty water is seen slowly and steadily trickling down a drain below the faucet. 

We are then shown transparent bags of algae hanging somewhere: It is alarmingly apparent that the algae are no longer green in color and have all gone bad. 

QUESTIONS: Is there no one left who can maintain the Aniara’s water and food supply? Or simply no one on the ship who cares to perform these tasks anymore? What and how are the remaining passengers surviving on? And for how long?

24:e året (Year 24) – Sarkofagen (The Sarcophagus)

As the ever-present Milky Way shines in the cosmic background, the Aniara enters our view in the foreground, as it has often done before. This time, however, the vessel no longer resembles a glowing city at night, for no lights are visible anywhere along its blackened metallic bulk. The beam screen, which once surrounded the Aniara to blot out the stars and that its designer was once so briefly proud of, is also gone.

The Aniara is not completely dark, however: Just outside a now desolate interior corridor, there is a white light shining from the entrance to the former Mima Hall. In the room which once housed the spaceship’s AI, we find the few surviving passengers who are left of the vessel’s original compliment of eight thousand human souls twenty-four years earlier…

Shrouded in an ashen light, ten people listen silently to a blind woman speaking as they either sit or lay on the hall floor. She is probably the same person we saw during Year 4 who was being pulled by penitent cult members on a former luggage cart.  

What is left of the Aniara passenger complement sit in what is left of the Mima Hall, almost one-quarter of a century after they left a ruined Earth for what they hoped would be their new home on Mars. MR sits among the survivors as they wait to make their final journey.[/caption

“On Earth I saw the light… with my skin,” the woman – whom the poem calls the blind poet – begins. “The vision seared me… my skin. I was blinded by a god. Give us light. Give us light. Give us light.”

Among the survivors we find the former Mimarobe. She has aged since we last saw her fourteen years earlier: MR is barely able to keep her eyes open as the sightless woman begs the Universe for a return of the natural light they once knew from their home star. The scene fades on MR’s worn and tired face.

COMMENT 1 of 2: Some of the lines spoken by the blind poet in Year 24 are close to what the same character says in Canto 58 of Martinson’s poem. They also resemble the chants of that other cult we witnessed in the film version twenty years earlier, as they asked for light from the stars to “come closer” to them. 

COMMENT 2 of 2: It is also ironic, expected, and sad that the Aniara has finally become exactly what The Astronomer had predicted in Year 6 and was essentially killed for saying aloud: “A sarcophagus… a coffin.” That anyone has managed to stay alive aboard this vessel for over two further decades, when systems and resources were already in the process of failing years earlier, seems nothing short of a miracle. 

Or is it chance?

5,981,407:e året (Year 5,981,407) – Lyra Bild (Lyra Constellation)

“…with a vessel large enough to contain the necessaries of life, a select party of ladies and gentlemen might start for the Milky Way, and if all went right, their descendants would arrive there in the course of a few million years.” – John Munro, A Trip to Venus (1897)

As the title card makes powerfully clear, an incredibly long time – by human standards, at least, if not cosmic ones – has passed since we were last with the Aniara. 

A brilliant white star glares in the center of our film screen. On the left half of the screen is a smaller shining object, although it is hard to tell if it is another star or a planet. To the right of the star, we can just make out a small black shard heading towards the shining sun: It is the Aniara. Now the vessel is truly dark, for its systems ceased functioning untold ages ago.

We return to what was once known as the Mima Hall, lit by that alien sun with a blue-white light streaming in from beyond. On an illuminated sliver of its floor are piles of dust: The ancient remains of the few passengers who sought refuge of a sort with Mima once last time, their wish for sunlight granted at last, though much too late. We wonder if the Mimarobe is among them.

Above the dust float pieces of the algae that once sustained the crew and passengers. The descendants of these simple creatures could be the only organisms still alive aboard the Aniara after almost six million years, along with various unseen microbes. Their potential survival would have been assisted by the deep space cold permeating the ship. 

The screen is suddenly filled with the visage of an alien planet circling that unnamed star. Unlike the home world of humanity witnessed so very long ago, this globe has green continents and blue oceans. The patches of clouds drifting over its surface are white and calm.The remains of the Aniara come into view, bisecting this globe from our perspective like a long black spear as it drifts in front of this world before moving over its nightside and disappearing back into the eternal darkness of space. 

The film credits begin to roll up as the camera lingers on the planet, leaving us with a multitude of feelings, thoughts, and questions on all that we have just seen and endured.

Here is a video of the ending of Aniara, including the scrolling film credits:

Thoughts on the Final Scene/Canto

To have credits appear at the end of a film listing all those who were part of and worked on this production has been a long standard practice for the cinema. Aniara is no exception to this rule, as you can see in the previous linked video clip.

I think the credits here serve another purpose beyond mere background information: They provide a brief respite of sorts to bring us out of our collective trance as often happens with a film that pulls you in like Aniara. 

We have just experienced almost two hours of immersion in a world where Earth has been ruined by a combination of human negligence and arrogance. A group of survivors attempting to escape their destroyed home planet are stranded in deep space with no hope of rescue. They are left to live and die after a long period of existential, emotional, and physical suffering – often at their own hands as much as the indifferent Universe.

In the final scenes, we are confronted with an immense stretch of time and a ship of the dead in nearly every sense of the word. All this is contrasted, ironically and even cruelly in its presentation, with the Aniara arriving at a beautiful-looking alien world that the passengers might have made their new home; only of course it is far, far too late for this. 

Even this remote idea of hope is tinged with the thought that if by some miracle the distant descendants of the humans onboard the Aniara had made it to this new planet alive, they might still possess the potential to neglect, abuse, and ultimately destroy their latest home as their ancestors had done with Earth.

The credits help to remind our engaged brain, especially if one sees this film in a darkened theater setting, that Aniara is a work of fiction – that what we saw has not happened in reality, at least not yet. We have been given our blunt existential warning: Now we need to respond accordingly.

The Lyra Constellation and Year 5,981,407

The Year 5,981,407 is an invention of the film. In the poem’s last Canto, number 103, the character of MR says the Aniara traveled to “Lyre’s figure” for “fifteen thousand years.” 

Although we were told the speed of the ship when it left the vicinity of Earth – 64 kilometers per second (kps), which equates to 39.7 miles per second (mps), or almost 143,164 miles per hour (mph) – neither work detailed exactly where the vessel was headed beyond the rather vague destination of the constellation of Lyra the Lyre, a human-created sky boundary where many millions of star systems reside in our galaxy across many thousands of light years.

Thanks to modern astronomical satellites like Kepler, whose examinations included the Lyra region, we do know of many real exoworlds inhabiting that section of space, and those are just a mere fraction of what is likely out there. That the Aniara would encounter any alien planets along its unplanned path even well after five million years’ time is highly improbable but certainly not impossible. 

COMMENT: In an interview from 2019, Hugo Lilja said that the exoplanet in the film was named Kepler and that it “could potentially support life which was only found a few years ago.” Lilja was probably referring to Kepler-62, a K-class star system about 980 light years (9,271,492,818,917,722 kilometers or 5,761,052,865,719,936 miles) from Earth which the Kepler astronomical satellite helped to determine had at least five worlds circling it in 2013. The outermost of these distant globes might fit the bill for the one depicted on screen. When Harry Martinson released the original poem in 1956, no confirmed exoworlds were known to astronomers.

In this 2018 piece from Popular Astronomy (in Swedish), the filmmakers mention Kepler-62f specifically as the exoplanet the Aniara eventually passes by. They also mention 2014 GM54 (523700) as the Trans-Neptunian Object (TNO) the vessel might have been able to get close enough to and use its mass (one reference says it is the size of Connecticut) to slingshot itself back towards Mars. 

https://www.popularastronomi.se/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/2018_3_aniara.pdf

Our Milky Way galaxy may have over 400 billion stars and certainly appears crowded when we look towards the center of our stellar island, but the average distances between celestial objects are much vaster than we, who have spent our entire species’ history on a single small planet, can truly comprehend.

At present, humanity has sent five deep space probes into interstellar space. This was done not as part of any planned missions to that region of the galaxy: Their need to reach the various worlds of the outer Sol system well beyond Mars required velocities which would subsequently cause them to escape the gravitational pull of our yellow dwarf star Sol. 

None of these robotic explorers were aimed at any particular star system as part of their missions, as their nuclear power sources will cease to function long before they could reach even the nearest star systems. These galactic ambassadors will pass relatively close to a handful of star systems over the millennia. By close, I mean within a few light years. The odds that any of them might pass an exoplanet as close as the Aniara did, even given a few billion years’ time, are quite low. 

COMMENT: This is why Paul Gilster of Centauri Dreams revisited in December of 2024 a plan he first wrote about in 2015 to intentionally aim the twin Voyager probes closer to certain stars while these machines are still functioning and communicative, although the distances will still be measured in light years and the flyby dates in millennia. Until more deep space probes become available, the Voyagers are our best chance to pass relatively near some of our celestial neighbors: The two Pioneer probes have been lost to the void since 1995 (Pioneer 11) and 2003 (Pioneer 10) and New Horizons current mission focus is on reaching another Kuiper Belt object before it too runs out of power.

The article details are here:

https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2024/12/24/holiday-reprise-voyager-to-a-star/

The filmmakers of Aniara could have shown the space vessel simply drifting off into the starry void at the end, the final cosmic seal to its ultimate fate. The ship did essentially just that in the final canto of Martinson’s poem. For dramatic purposes, however, that the Aniara encountered what appears to be a habitable planet resembling Earth as it once was does add that final ironic twist to the story, coming much too late for any of the vessel’s passengers and perhaps any other humans left in the galaxy.

As for that specific year number – 5,981,407 – it was primarily selected as the correct period of time the Aniara would need to reach Kepler-62f at the speed it was moving. My other speculative thought is that this number is a fair approximation of how long the ancestors of the human species have existed on Earth, so there is this symbolic element. 

Could the filmmakers have been saying with this number that this is how long humanity will last and the extinction-level end of our species is upon us? Or are they suggesting that our species could exist another six million years or longer if we can learn to coexist and better steward our current planetary home? 

Though we are given no detailed visual evidence as to who or what life forms may be on that alien world set before the Aniara, it is not out of the question that the distant descendants of humanity settled there long ago and learned the lessons from their ancestors how to take the proper respect and care of a planet. 

This would mean that despite what was done to Earth, the settlers who did make it to Mars managed to survive and thrive well and long enough to reach not only other places in the Sol system, but mount missions to other star systems, including the one we see circling a sun deep in the Lyra constellation. We can even hope that our future children in this reality were able to eventually return to Earth and repair their home world to make it livable again.