Mobilities at the end: (inter)-planetary futures and the ethics of evacuation mobility

What might mobility look like at the end of the world? In this paper I explore different apprehensions of inter-planetary mobility or “evacuation” as our Earth appears to become uninhabitable for life, and humanity is forced to seek a way to “exit” or evacuate the planet. In these imaginings of mobilities in the future, rendered at a sometimes impossibly vast, planetary scale, evacuation has become a common trope for drama, used as a technical but dramatic device that is often left unquestioned or critically examined. And yet these forms of planetary evacuation tend to repeat other aesthetic and narrative forms that are interrogated within the paper at length, especially as they pertain to problematic gendered, racial, colonial and reproductive logics. Sketching out this extreme form of “emergency mobility” through science fiction literature and film, the paper explores the politics, ethics and potential (in)justices of planetary evacuation mobilities. But planetary evacuations are perhaps not as interesting on their own because of what they might say about how we perform and imagine evacuation mobilities on the Earth now, and in the near future.