Earlier this week, a message expressing pets’ space exploration dreams appeared on the large billboard in New York Times Square. The video was displayed on the 61-metre-long Times Square screen, showing scenes of SpaceX Starship launch along with the message: “Hi, Elon! Let’s send our beloved XOOX pets in the Starship to Mars to make history. Together, we can make this dream come true!”

The message, directed towards SpaceX founder Elon Musk, was actually a promotional gimmick created on the pet-exclusive pet networking service (PNS) application XOOX, which launched globally on the same day.

XOOX is an application operated through pet accounts, not human ones, and provides a service function that analyzes the patterns around the eyelids and eyes of pets to register their Face Detection biometric ID and then verify their identification.

Pets ‘owning’ accounts on the app can then share their daily lives as the main characters, interact with followers, and even become influencers by participating in various challenges – such as, presumably, going to space, if XOOX is successful.

After all, who wouldn’t one day want to keep up with Muffy’s trip to Mars, Charlie’s journey to Jupiter, or Loki’s vacay on Venus.

Certainly not us.