So here's the thing about me: I love spooky stuff. Most of my passion projects are usually horror. I like paranormal videos, I enjoy cryptids, haunted houses, folklore and anything involving creepy crawlies. Whether it's Bigfoot, Lisks, Area 51, the Browndoor Incident, UFO footage, the Gorefield tapes, government conspiracies, the West Kentucky Meatman, LOAB, the Green Children from the hollow earth or the Billy Spiderhands murders. I enjoy anything where horror meets the real world. 

And xenos is a big opportunity there. Because we live in a vast universe governed by ambivalent laws of nature. Our own world, beautiful as it may be, is also the host to ancient and brutal viruses hidden deep below the melting polar ice caps waiting for the day when they get to visit us in our showers and watertaps, deep jungles full of terrifying parasitic bugs, and let's not forget about the scariest thing of all: Your next door neighbour who, for all you know, has a big freezer full of heads. 

Carl Sagan believed in otherworldly life, and so do a lot of astronomers. It's a mathematical fact that, given the sheer amount of planets out there, some of them will likely catch the same thunder in a bottle as we did. And guess what? They're probably just as spooky as us, if not worse. Imagine the Andromeda galaxy's equivalent of Jeffrey Dahmer, or wasps, or Nazis, or some kind of Jeffrey Dahmer wasp Nazi. 

And that's just the living stuff. Take a moment to think about the Tunguska event. At any time, in any place, a giant explosion can just come out of the sky and level a whole city. Scientists have found signs that there may be such a thing as wandering antimatter. Big refractive black holes that sail through space, capable of extinguishing a billion lives in less than a second, compressing us all into a pea-sized blob full of atoms. As we're perversely adjoined into a dead pellet so dense that it could crush a million cars stacked on top of eachother. 

Truth is, with all the scary stuff out there in the void, Earth must have a guardian angel. Each morning when we open our eyes is nothing short of a miracle. In spite of all the cosmic brutality that lurks in the shadows of our limited scientific instrumentation, the most dangerous thing of all appears to be ourselves. Between nuclear weapons, pollution, corporate bullshit and military industry, we're a suicidal species. Slowly putting together a semtex vest built by late-stage capitalism. 

And what's the escape offered to us? How do we get away from this death spiral? 

Well, you're in luck, because Elon Musk, the car manufacturing billionaire who built his success on the African apartheid, is going to take us all to Mars. And what's better yet is that he announced on Twitter, that place of intelligent and moral thought, that the Mars colony won't recognise international law such as the UN declaration of human rights. 

So if you thought Earth was scary, then don't worry, you can always try your luck with the evil version of Noah's Ark. Working for a Bond villain who can cut off your family's oxygen supply at the push of a button.

Which brings me to an even scarier notion: Imagine the Andromeda galaxy's equivalent of Elon Musk. 

Reason and creativity are equal parts a gift and a curse. Sapience has afforded us invention, philosophy and conscience. But it has also offered the propensity of unbound perversions, cruelties and transgression. It has cast us into a role as the arbitrators of our own determination, a trait that is utmost unique in the order of natural things. 

And with this blank slate, we have been given the means of great good and great evil. And to our tragedy we find ourselves born into a world where cruelty is mistaken for intelligence, where selfishness is mistaken for success, where indoctrination is mistaken for education, and where power is mistaken for virtue. Our species is religiously devoted to the worship of evil men. From the kings who carried out atrocities in the name of Christ, to the politicians who carry out the same atrocities in the name of democracy. 

And that to me is quite scary. That to me is as real as horror gets. How we drink lies from our media as though it was nectar, how we waste our minds on facile distractions and vapid entertainment. How we so willingly poison ourselves with pleasant lies, as a though we reside in the gutter struck by the fairy's curse. Beneath the thin veil of mundane notions lies a harrowing truth that tells of tragedy, suffering and a broken and twisted species. 

Earth is one of the most terrifying planets one could conceive of. Imagine what else may lie out there in the stars.