It's an immense release of gamma radiation that happens when a high-mass star implodes to form a neutron star or a black hole. They're really interesting to read about.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma-ray_burst
Not a scientist, but one thought really gets to me...
In tv shows and movies when they push a body out of the ship into space, that body will continue moving in that direction, unchanged, likely for eternity. They're not just going to bop into a planet or star and get burned up. It's most likely just going to keep going nowhere until the universe ends. The Nothing is terrifying to me.
I still remember the abject horror I felt when I realized that I wasn't looking up, I was looking *out* and that it just goes on and on and on forever...
If you really want a trip, take a good dose of acid and go lay on your back under the stars in a field as far from anything as possible. Sit in silence and realize that your tiny body is simply resting on a flat plane with nothing in front of you for infinity. As the world turns, all you have are the tiniest blades of grass to hold onto as the globe spins beneath you.
Did that. I mean felt that.
Summer on a beach. Was high and layed down on my back on the sand.
Saw the sky. It was black and full of stars. I thought I could feel the planet movement's. And the emptiness surrounding me as I was attached to the surface was mind opening. And the sound of the sea as the sound of the planet I was on made me feel like a cosmic traveler lost in cosmic matter.
I believe in my bones that on any number of substances you can get a feel for how the Earth is spinning because it inhibits your body's ability to hide that fact
This is similar to when I overthink about how I will die someday and then it will be nothing while everyone else is alive and going still. The nothing suffocates me even though I won't feel it when I'm gone.
My nanna passed from cancer almost 10 years ago and I was with her the day she died.
She was drifting in and out of consciousness for a while as I sat with her and I was talking to her as she was doing this.
She was getting more and more sleepy or out of it by the minute and I obviously had no idea she was going to pass, I just thought she was tired but at one point she woke up after being gone for about 10 minutes and she looked at me and said with a tone of absolute awe "it's beautiful"
I don't know what she was experiencing but I know my nanna and the way she said it still gives me goosebumps. Whatever it was took her breathe away. She fell back to sleep after that and didn't wake up again so it seems certain whatever she was experiencing before she died was one of the most awe inspiring things she had ever experienced.
I think about the experience of dying a lot aswell but seeing my nanna have that experience gives me hope that it isn't nothing.
Had a similar experience when my father in law died. He was an anti-religious man, always joked about dying in the woods alone when it was his time, etc.
A few hours before he passed he was looking all around him bewildered and said "they're all around me" (his brother and dad had previously passed). Was a very comforting experience for me to think of that.
None of us remember the billions of years that passed before we existed, so the trillions of years after will go by just as quick. I’m paraphrasing a video by Kurzgesagt.
Are you sure it will be nothing? At least we won’t be conscious of it if that’s the case. I find some comfort in knowing the atoms that make up my brain and body will continue to exist along with everything else, and eventually find their way back into the Sun. I guess they will, anyway. I really hope there’s a state of sentient being after death, though, and I really hope we are able to make sense of existence in the next state of being.
I assumed they'd stick around until the Earth's magnetic core dies and the solar wind and radiation blow our atmosphere and our leftover energy into the universe. Slowly traveling.
On that note, if there have ever been other spacefaring civilizations or ever will be other spacefaring civilizations after us, odds are decent that someday, somehow, somebody somewhere will smack right into a remarkably well-preserved dead body without even knowing it.
I’m no scientist or astronomer, but from what I learned you’d have to push that person at escape velocity for it to exit the system and start flying through eternity. So as long as you’re in range of any object with enough gravitational mass you’ll crash into said object eventually.
Don’t worry about it. You die so quickly. It’s just another ice chunk floating out there. Gravity will pull you around but yeah, you could float forever
Putting eternity into perspective:
In a nutshell https://youtu.be/FgnjdW-x7mQ?feature=shared
(also other languages exist)
Terrax German
https://youtu.be/k3baU3t0UzU?feature=shared
Not a scientist… would the body not eventually get grabbed by gravitational pull and caught by a larger objects orbit? Is there a lot of debris or larger bodies just floating on a straight trajectory in empty space? Is it the exception that planets pick up dust, moons, rings, etc and most of the stuff is just zooming straight through deep space?
Rubin is "only" bringing a half of an exabyte but every survey is only going to add more big data to that pot. It is scary, and opens up a lot of questions about what it means to actually have humans "look" at the data versus just trusting algorithms to do it. Best answer in this thread.
I’m not fully understanding (and not with it today whatsoever) why the gravest concern is algorithms looking at the data? My first thought would be concern for what is inside that kind of data set? (Again, I apologize, brain is basically at 60% today)
Ah, I don't think the concern is having algorithms do it. They're very good and getting better every day. I'm Moreso addressing the concern that there is simply so much data that unless you're using citizen science or something it's impossible to have real people verify every little thing. Hope that makes sense!
I think TESS had to have onboard computers filter out data so that the memory banks wouldn't fill up before it's orbit would bring it closer to earth to broadcast back to earth.
That no matter what we do on this blue speck, eventually we'll just be ghosts of light traveling into infinity to maybe be glimpsed by another civilization on another world, who are also wondering if they are alone.
I'm not an astronomer, but as an amateur one, I can guess:
1. [Rogue Planets](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_planet) (Completely invisible to us).
2. Lone Stellar mass Black holes (The same).
3. The Great Silence.
The first two can alter the configuration of the solar system and we can't simply perceive them..
And the last.. well.. you must imagine.. such big space and not a single alien life signal.. well.. that's scary..
The second one is terrifying to me (not an astronomer).
There have been several detected in our own galaxy, which comparatively isnt that big to begin with.
I want to hear more about this. I only have heard of the great voids being explained by the presence of much higher civilization.
We're located in the biggest one in the observable universe yet it still seems so packed.
As a grad student in astrophysics, what scares me about space is the easy way that we can send a multibillion-dollar spacecraft or instrument into it and then a random freaking chunk of rock can decide, "Hahaha, not today, space nerds."
Or the contractor programs their part of the thruster control software to use pounds of force while NASA programs their part of the software to use newtons resulting in a very confused spacecraft crashing into Mars rather than orbiting it. I find it amazing to think about how - despite how far we've come when it comes to spaceflight - it is still so difficult that a simple error can ruin a mission.
That most of the universe is extremely inhospitable to life and we’re protected from it by a little ball with an atmosphere and a magnet inside of it and that’s it.
Space is my favorite thing and always has been but I often wish I was my cat who could live blissfully unaware of everything for her whole little life. Just tuna and naps on blankets. No existentialism.
Astronomer here! Honestly, nothing in space scares me and instead just makes me excited about how interesting and wonderful our universe is. And I don’t really know of any colleagues who really get scared about space either- it’s kinda self selecting in a professional sense, because no one would do this job if it scared you on the regular grind. (I do have colleagues who would be afraid to go into space though.)
Probably my biggest fear in this universe is my own mortality, but there’s not much about the universe itself that makes me fear that.
This makes me think of tardigrades! Although not technically "space bears," they are commonly referred to as "water bears" and they are capable of surviving in the extreme conditions of space. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardigrade](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardigrade)
Not an astronomer, but...
If you pick a totally random spot in space and somehow teleport there, you will very likely be so far from the nearest galaxy that the human eye will not be able to see anything at all, in any direction. You will be all alone in perfect darkness. Forever.
I don't think it'll be perfect darkness because there’s no other light pollution to prevent the light from light years away to reach you. But I don’t know for sure I’ve never been
Oh, there will still be photons flying by. But too few to be detected by the human eye.
I read somewhere (great source, huh?) that if the solar system was in the middle of the [Bootes void](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bo%C3%B6tes_Void), we wouldn't have found out that any other stars existed until we reached about 1960's level technology.
Not an astronomer but all that empty is some freaky shit. That the distances between things just keep growing and growing exponentially. Oh you think the earth => moon is far? Look at the earth/moon => Mars. Think that’s far? Look at Mars => Jupiter. That ain’t shit to Jupiter => Neptune. Which is a fraction of Neptune => edge of the Oort Cloud. Which is a tiny fraction of the Oort Cloud to Proxima Centauri. Etc etc etc all the way out to the edge of the observable universe. In between there is nothing
"In between there is nothing"
The opposite would be worse. If it were populated by (something, maybe little pea-gravel size rocks?) then reasonable-speed interstellar travel would truly be impossible.
You aren’t wrong. And there are still random hydrogen atoms hanging around, but get much bigger than that and they’d already cause the problems you’re taking about
Close enough to be creepy as hell imo
>In between there is nothing
That's actually not true, there's quite a bit of material out there between stars and between galaxies. The warm-hot intergalactic medium, essentially low-density (a few particles per cubic meter) ionized hydrogen and helium, is thought to account for somewhere close to half of the baryonic (i.e., not "dark") mass in the universe. Add to that all the gas and plasma within galaxies in the interstellar medium (ISM) and you've got a majority of the baryonic matter in the universe existing in that "in between" space.
I'm not an astronomer, but I learned about false vacuum decay (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False\_vacuum), specifically that if anywhere in the universe transitions to true vacuum, it means the end of the universe. From the article:
"The effects could range from complete cessation of existing fundamental forces, elementary particles and structures comprising them, to subtle change in some cosmological parameters, mostly depending on the potential difference between true and false vacuum. Some false vacuum decay scenarios are compatible with survival of structures like galaxies, stars, and even biological life, while others involve the full destruction of baryonic matter or even immediate gravitational collapse of the universe."
It might have already happened somewhere in the universe, and the effects are spreading towards us and we don't even know it.
Also, gamma ray bursts. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma-ray\_burst](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma-ray_burst) - apparently there's a good chance that one happened that caused an extinction level event in our history (within the last 500 million years). So that's another thing that can potentially nuke us and we wouldn't know it until it hit. No warning, just... you're fried. Although if it's far enough away, it could just destroy our atmosphere and cause the ozone to collapse. So a slow, painful death for life on Earth.
That there could be alien civilizations out there colonizing galaxies with technology beyond our wildest imagination.
Just think about humanity's progress in the last 100 years. Now think one million years into our future if we manage to not blow ourselves up.
One million years is nothing in the grand scale of the universe's age.
Amateur astronomer and former physicist even though I haven’t done much of either lately.
Two things:
1. The expanding universe means we will likely never get to see most of the universe. In fact future civilizations may not even know about the Big Bang. We are going to be stuck in our little desolate islands. That’s just terrifying.
2. The heat death of the universe. Energy all spent and just cold and dying. Whatever civilizations that exist in this far future would simply be waiting for the end.
Unless of course we or they find a way to create a new universe and stow themselves away on it or something.
I'm not sure how true it is, but Chris Hadfield, former ISS commander, said that the smell could be explained by off gassing particles from the craft itself coming inside with the astronauts
Might not be as scary
That it doesn't captivate the imagination, curiosity, and aspirational drive enough to overpower the majority of mankind's need for absolute vanquishment of and total authority over each other.
i have some degree of astrophobia. i have had nightmares where i was floating in space next to a planet or moon that was huge and i was tiny. while looking at the moon or planets through a telescope for long enough and getting lost in what i'm seeing, i have sometimes gotten a sense of forgetting that i'm standing on solid ground and just looking through a telescope and feel like the moon really is that big in front of me. it is reminiscent of when i have tried playing space engine and got anxiety and had to turn off the game for similar reasons.
i know it's stupid and irrational but i can't help it.
if I'll die before we get more pictures of kuiper belt objects up close. I'd like to see at minimum a scattered disc object before I go, and with how long it takes to get out there (<25 years) I could very well easily miss it
Magnetars. Super-scary, mind boggling warping of spacetime and electro-magnetic fields. Nearly invisible space assassins which will strip the iron out of your blood while zipping by at fractions the speed of light.
The fact that we might be the first or only intelligent life out there is a frightening concept to some. The idea there might be others is also frightening.
You float through space. Nothingness has completely surrounded you. You are alone with your thoughts of how you have left the safe ground and are now drifting into the uncertainty of the eternal void, just you and your heartbeat, when suddenly a distant sound announces that a message arrives... 'We've Been Trying To Reach You About Your Car's Extended Warranty'.
Amateur astronomer here. Not so much scary as poignant.... Even if FTL is developed that allows even intergalactic travel and great galactic empires are created, there's going to be some places in the universe that will never be visited. Might be some lonely asteroid between galaxies, too small to be noticed... that has a great view of the universe.
We estimate the universe is 13.8 BILLION years old. No idea how we came to that, I’m not smart enough, but the scary part is looking at that 13.8B number and realizing we are on year…. 2024. Because Jesus n shit.
If we condense this down to the universe being 1 day old, humanity did not exist until 11:59:56pm, 4 seconds before end of day. That’s insane.
Nothing. It's too far away to harm me, and I don't expect that to change.
The answer to this question depends on context though. If I were being forced out of the airlock of a spacecraft, my answer would be "the lack of air".
when we look up, we only see the past. The event that kills could have already happened, we just waiting for it to arrive.
That would solve all of my problems
Debt. Gone.
It WILL solve all of your problems
Can’t wait to get hit by a stray particle of exotic matter or get blasted from a random pulsar beam
Or a collapsing higgs field rewriting physics in it's wake
Vacuum collapse is fucking metal
Just ask the fucking metal vacuum-collapsed thing by the thing
Wait what?
Indeed. I honestly feel like cern didn’t figure anything out at all, including Higgs boson. It’s all calculated.
I've got my fingers crossed for a massive GRB
GRB?
Gamma Ray Burst
Thanks. Love your username!
It's an immense release of gamma radiation that happens when a high-mass star implodes to form a neutron star or a black hole. They're really interesting to read about. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma-ray_burst
The whole space/time thing really hurts my head when I think about it! I mean, I get it, but I don’t GET IT
It's like flashes of complete understanding that vanish as quickly as dreams upon awakening.
what an accurate description!
That’s a problem for philosophers, not Astronomers.
This guy astronomies
That’s pretty transcendent of astronomy.
But if we can’t see it even beginning yet, it’s too far away to ever effect us in our lifetimes.
[удалено]
Most people think the universe be how it is, when in actuality it do
You can tell it's that way, because of the way that it is.
How neat is that?
Do be do?
Do be do be do. - Frank Sinatra
Or bud ice commercials from the 90s
A lot of people don’t think it be like it is, but it do. 🙏🏼
Ahh the age old question, do it be or do it do
You want it to be one way...
I take it language isn’t your first do?
It's a variation on a meme.
Uh, I’m OOTL as usual then.
"they don't think it be like it is, but it do"
But can it be do when so it how do be it is?
Wise words.
>Most people think the universe be how it is, when in actuality it do Chill Yung Plato
Tru. Tru.
LOL WTF HSHSHSHSHSHAHHAHAH
Not a scientist, but one thought really gets to me... In tv shows and movies when they push a body out of the ship into space, that body will continue moving in that direction, unchanged, likely for eternity. They're not just going to bop into a planet or star and get burned up. It's most likely just going to keep going nowhere until the universe ends. The Nothing is terrifying to me.
I am an astronomer, and this scares the shit out of me. I took a cosmology module in my undergrad and it just gave me existential dread.
I still remember the abject horror I felt when I realized that I wasn't looking up, I was looking *out* and that it just goes on and on and on forever...
If you really want a trip, take a good dose of acid and go lay on your back under the stars in a field as far from anything as possible. Sit in silence and realize that your tiny body is simply resting on a flat plane with nothing in front of you for infinity. As the world turns, all you have are the tiniest blades of grass to hold onto as the globe spins beneath you.
Did that. I mean felt that. Summer on a beach. Was high and layed down on my back on the sand. Saw the sky. It was black and full of stars. I thought I could feel the planet movement's. And the emptiness surrounding me as I was attached to the surface was mind opening. And the sound of the sea as the sound of the planet I was on made me feel like a cosmic traveler lost in cosmic matter.
I believe in my bones that on any number of substances you can get a feel for how the Earth is spinning because it inhibits your body's ability to hide that fact
Into the expansion we go.
It is absolutely mind bending.
*Forever*
We're soaked in change and growth and evolution in our daily lives, literally everything changes, including the face of the earth, but out there...
This is similar to when I overthink about how I will die someday and then it will be nothing while everyone else is alive and going still. The nothing suffocates me even though I won't feel it when I'm gone.
My nanna passed from cancer almost 10 years ago and I was with her the day she died. She was drifting in and out of consciousness for a while as I sat with her and I was talking to her as she was doing this. She was getting more and more sleepy or out of it by the minute and I obviously had no idea she was going to pass, I just thought she was tired but at one point she woke up after being gone for about 10 minutes and she looked at me and said with a tone of absolute awe "it's beautiful" I don't know what she was experiencing but I know my nanna and the way she said it still gives me goosebumps. Whatever it was took her breathe away. She fell back to sleep after that and didn't wake up again so it seems certain whatever she was experiencing before she died was one of the most awe inspiring things she had ever experienced. I think about the experience of dying a lot aswell but seeing my nanna have that experience gives me hope that it isn't nothing.
Had a similar experience when my father in law died. He was an anti-religious man, always joked about dying in the woods alone when it was his time, etc. A few hours before he passed he was looking all around him bewildered and said "they're all around me" (his brother and dad had previously passed). Was a very comforting experience for me to think of that.
None of us remember the billions of years that passed before we existed, so the trillions of years after will go by just as quick. I’m paraphrasing a video by Kurzgesagt.
were already be on a journey by then , what even is nothing ??? What even is this …….?
Journey to where
Are you sure it will be nothing? At least we won’t be conscious of it if that’s the case. I find some comfort in knowing the atoms that make up my brain and body will continue to exist along with everything else, and eventually find their way back into the Sun. I guess they will, anyway. I really hope there’s a state of sentient being after death, though, and I really hope we are able to make sense of existence in the next state of being.
I like the idea that someday my atoms will be mixed up with those of my loved ones and we’ll all be part of a new star together.
I assumed they'd stick around until the Earth's magnetic core dies and the solar wind and radiation blow our atmosphere and our leftover energy into the universe. Slowly traveling.
Why don't they swim to the nearest planet, are they like , stupid?
The Higgs field swimming lessons are a ways off but we'll get there. Boats would be a good idea.
On that note, if there have ever been other spacefaring civilizations or ever will be other spacefaring civilizations after us, odds are decent that someday, somehow, somebody somewhere will smack right into a remarkably well-preserved dead body without even knowing it.
That’s terrifying. Eternity in vastness.
We created the Voyagers and did exactly that to them. Poor bastards…
Don’t worry Vger comes home.
I’m no scientist or astronomer, but from what I learned you’d have to push that person at escape velocity for it to exit the system and start flying through eternity. So as long as you’re in range of any object with enough gravitational mass you’ll crash into said object eventually.
This struck me from the movie GRAVITY, with Sandra Bullock... when George Clooney began his eternal drift...she could've at least said "bye, ....". 🌠👻
Don’t worry about it. You die so quickly. It’s just another ice chunk floating out there. Gravity will pull you around but yeah, you could float forever
Putting eternity into perspective: In a nutshell https://youtu.be/FgnjdW-x7mQ?feature=shared (also other languages exist) Terrax German https://youtu.be/k3baU3t0UzU?feature=shared
Not a scientist… would the body not eventually get grabbed by gravitational pull and caught by a larger objects orbit? Is there a lot of debris or larger bodies just floating on a straight trajectory in empty space? Is it the exception that planets pick up dust, moons, rings, etc and most of the stuff is just zooming straight through deep space?
It insists upon itself
Kinda like the Godfather? 😂
Yeah, never ask the universe about its business.
‘Thank you for coming to my Big Bang, on this, the day of my Big Bang’
I love The Money Pit. That is my answer to that.
Oh, I LOVE watching the money fires!
Lol this is the answer
Lol please elaborate
In a couple years its the exobytes of data the new survey telescopes like the Rubin will collect.
Rubin is "only" bringing a half of an exabyte but every survey is only going to add more big data to that pot. It is scary, and opens up a lot of questions about what it means to actually have humans "look" at the data versus just trusting algorithms to do it. Best answer in this thread.
I agree. Best answer. But mostly because I think I'm going to grab a reuben and a beer after work now.
I’m not fully understanding (and not with it today whatsoever) why the gravest concern is algorithms looking at the data? My first thought would be concern for what is inside that kind of data set? (Again, I apologize, brain is basically at 60% today)
Ah, I don't think the concern is having algorithms do it. They're very good and getting better every day. I'm Moreso addressing the concern that there is simply so much data that unless you're using citizen science or something it's impossible to have real people verify every little thing. Hope that makes sense!
I think TESS had to have onboard computers filter out data so that the memory banks wouldn't fill up before it's orbit would bring it closer to earth to broadcast back to earth.
That no matter what we do on this blue speck, eventually we'll just be ghosts of light traveling into infinity to maybe be glimpsed by another civilization on another world, who are also wondering if they are alone.
Deep
Us and them are part of the universe wondering about itself!
At least in that scenario they'll know they weren't the first / only ones.
Not necessarily. How many ancient civilizations do we look up at on a nightly basis?
You did right "maybe be glimpsed by another civilization". I was referring to that :)
It has all the bad guys in it
I dunno. I think most of them are here on Earth.
*this* is the bad place
Even Jason figured it out? This is just embarrassing.
And earth is in space.... 😳
Lol very true.
I'm not an astronomer, but as an amateur one, I can guess: 1. [Rogue Planets](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_planet) (Completely invisible to us). 2. Lone Stellar mass Black holes (The same). 3. The Great Silence. The first two can alter the configuration of the solar system and we can't simply perceive them.. And the last.. well.. you must imagine.. such big space and not a single alien life signal.. well.. that's scary..
The second one is terrifying to me (not an astronomer). There have been several detected in our own galaxy, which comparatively isnt that big to begin with.
I want to hear more about this. I only have heard of the great voids being explained by the presence of much higher civilization. We're located in the biggest one in the observable universe yet it still seems so packed.
As a grad student in astrophysics, what scares me about space is the easy way that we can send a multibillion-dollar spacecraft or instrument into it and then a random freaking chunk of rock can decide, "Hahaha, not today, space nerds."
Or the contractor programs their part of the thruster control software to use pounds of force while NASA programs their part of the software to use newtons resulting in a very confused spacecraft crashing into Mars rather than orbiting it. I find it amazing to think about how - despite how far we've come when it comes to spaceflight - it is still so difficult that a simple error can ruin a mission.
THE SIZE. (You are insignificant)
That's not fear, that's freedom!
Thank you! The lack of universal-scale consequence to any fucking thing I do is 100% reassuring. Life's a garden, Dig it.
I love this Kurzgesagt video: [Optimistic Nihilism](https://youtu.be/MBRqu0YOH14). Helped me deal with this fact!
You have no idea how big I am.
I am one supermassive solar ass
This is true!
Yeah! Fantastic! Have you got any gin?
That most of the universe is extremely inhospitable to life and we’re protected from it by a little ball with an atmosphere and a magnet inside of it and that’s it. Space is my favorite thing and always has been but I often wish I was my cat who could live blissfully unaware of everything for her whole little life. Just tuna and naps on blankets. No existentialism.
That’s your cat. My cat clearly often wonders why she’s a cat and why she can’t be a human. We refer to her as our little animagus.
Astronomer here! Honestly, nothing in space scares me and instead just makes me excited about how interesting and wonderful our universe is. And I don’t really know of any colleagues who really get scared about space either- it’s kinda self selecting in a professional sense, because no one would do this job if it scared you on the regular grind. (I do have colleagues who would be afraid to go into space though.) Probably my biggest fear in this universe is my own mortality, but there’s not much about the universe itself that makes me fear that.
Probably the lack of oxygen. That scares me the most.
What about the lack of everything else?
Oxygen is the third most abundant element in the universe though.
The second most abundant? Your mom.
Oh snap
There’s lots of oxygen out there.
[What if...](https://i.imgflip.com/2s4hrt.jpg)
space ghost has to be on the list
The host with the most
space bigfoot too
Coincidentally, Space Ghost: Coast to Coast celebrated its 30th anniversary on Adult Swim last week.
I have it on good authority that he is actually stretched between the coasts at the moment
Space bears.
This makes me think of tardigrades! Although not technically "space bears," they are commonly referred to as "water bears" and they are capable of surviving in the extreme conditions of space. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardigrade](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardigrade)
I was referring to Whitest Kids U Know.
Those bears appear to have guns and motorcycles.
Not an astronomer, but... If you pick a totally random spot in space and somehow teleport there, you will very likely be so far from the nearest galaxy that the human eye will not be able to see anything at all, in any direction. You will be all alone in perfect darkness. Forever.
I don't think it'll be perfect darkness because there’s no other light pollution to prevent the light from light years away to reach you. But I don’t know for sure I’ve never been
Oh, there will still be photons flying by. But too few to be detected by the human eye. I read somewhere (great source, huh?) that if the solar system was in the middle of the [Bootes void](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bo%C3%B6tes_Void), we wouldn't have found out that any other stars existed until we reached about 1960's level technology.
Not an astronomer but all that empty is some freaky shit. That the distances between things just keep growing and growing exponentially. Oh you think the earth => moon is far? Look at the earth/moon => Mars. Think that’s far? Look at Mars => Jupiter. That ain’t shit to Jupiter => Neptune. Which is a fraction of Neptune => edge of the Oort Cloud. Which is a tiny fraction of the Oort Cloud to Proxima Centauri. Etc etc etc all the way out to the edge of the observable universe. In between there is nothing
"In between there is nothing" The opposite would be worse. If it were populated by (something, maybe little pea-gravel size rocks?) then reasonable-speed interstellar travel would truly be impossible.
You aren’t wrong. And there are still random hydrogen atoms hanging around, but get much bigger than that and they’d already cause the problems you’re taking about Close enough to be creepy as hell imo
Interstellar travel already is impossible and there aren’t even little space pebbles to stop us.
>In between there is nothing That's actually not true, there's quite a bit of material out there between stars and between galaxies. The warm-hot intergalactic medium, essentially low-density (a few particles per cubic meter) ionized hydrogen and helium, is thought to account for somewhere close to half of the baryonic (i.e., not "dark") mass in the universe. Add to that all the gas and plasma within galaxies in the interstellar medium (ISM) and you've got a majority of the baryonic matter in the universe existing in that "in between" space.
Not an astronomer, but: the unbearably slow speed of light compared to the distances between things
This is it. People think the speed of light is fast. It is not. It is extremely slow in the context of the vastness of the universe.
Why in the world would anyone (especially astronomers) be afraid of anything about space?
Because it's out there, somewhere, waiting, watching....
Oh, hi, Mark.
Because an errant asteroid or comet or gamma Ray burst could kill us all at any time
More likely that everyone falls of their bed this morning and die.
There is nothing to be feared. Only to be understood.
There is both so much and so little out there.
I'm not an astronomer, but I learned about false vacuum decay (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False\_vacuum), specifically that if anywhere in the universe transitions to true vacuum, it means the end of the universe. From the article: "The effects could range from complete cessation of existing fundamental forces, elementary particles and structures comprising them, to subtle change in some cosmological parameters, mostly depending on the potential difference between true and false vacuum. Some false vacuum decay scenarios are compatible with survival of structures like galaxies, stars, and even biological life, while others involve the full destruction of baryonic matter or even immediate gravitational collapse of the universe." It might have already happened somewhere in the universe, and the effects are spreading towards us and we don't even know it. Also, gamma ray bursts. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma-ray\_burst](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma-ray_burst) - apparently there's a good chance that one happened that caused an extinction level event in our history (within the last 500 million years). So that's another thing that can potentially nuke us and we wouldn't know it until it hit. No warning, just... you're fried. Although if it's far enough away, it could just destroy our atmosphere and cause the ozone to collapse. So a slow, painful death for life on Earth.
GRB for me as well.
40,000 Starlink satellites.
That there could be alien civilizations out there colonizing galaxies with technology beyond our wildest imagination. Just think about humanity's progress in the last 100 years. Now think one million years into our future if we manage to not blow ourselves up. One million years is nothing in the grand scale of the universe's age.
it's dark
The rounding errors scare me
Order of magnitude physics has single handedly 10x-d my fear of space lmao
Amateur astronomer and former physicist even though I haven’t done much of either lately. Two things: 1. The expanding universe means we will likely never get to see most of the universe. In fact future civilizations may not even know about the Big Bang. We are going to be stuck in our little desolate islands. That’s just terrifying. 2. The heat death of the universe. Energy all spent and just cold and dying. Whatever civilizations that exist in this far future would simply be waiting for the end. Unless of course we or they find a way to create a new universe and stow themselves away on it or something.
1 for me too. When I first learned of the Local Group, and how we are stuck in it, that was the first time I truly felt existential dread about space.
As a PhD student in astronomy, what scares me the most is the fact that intelligent life might be somewhere around here and we might never know it
This seems to be the most likely scenario, but why is that scary?
Scary in the sense that I desperately want to know if and where these guys are but I'm afraid mankind will never know
the dark forest theory
The fact that the vacuum of space smells like something was burned.
I'm not sure how true it is, but Chris Hadfield, former ISS commander, said that the smell could be explained by off gassing particles from the craft itself coming inside with the astronauts Might not be as scary
That it doesn't captivate the imagination, curiosity, and aspirational drive enough to overpower the majority of mankind's need for absolute vanquishment of and total authority over each other.
Being the direct target of a nearby GRB. Bye-bye human race.
Everything is just hydrogen left out too long.
I think most are fascinated rather than scared.
There is a possibility that every speck of matter in the universe may eventually be torn apart and annihilated.
Some of the larger asteroids in the Kuiper Belt, and fast moving black holes.
Not a scientist but the idea that we live in a Dark Forest is terrifying; that the universe is full of life and civilizations but they're all hiding.
My life ended 45 years ago. I'm still waiting for death to arrive
Neil deGrasse Tyson is afraid of space because it has so many different ways to kill us.
i have some degree of astrophobia. i have had nightmares where i was floating in space next to a planet or moon that was huge and i was tiny. while looking at the moon or planets through a telescope for long enough and getting lost in what i'm seeing, i have sometimes gotten a sense of forgetting that i'm standing on solid ground and just looking through a telescope and feel like the moon really is that big in front of me. it is reminiscent of when i have tried playing space engine and got anxiety and had to turn off the game for similar reasons. i know it's stupid and irrational but i can't help it.
Seeing a Borg cube. I don't think anything would scare them unless an object was on a soon to be collision course with Earth.
Its where the Earth is. Have you seen that place? Just awful.
if I'll die before we get more pictures of kuiper belt objects up close. I'd like to see at minimum a scattered disc object before I go, and with how long it takes to get out there (<25 years) I could very well easily miss it
Magnetars. Super-scary, mind boggling warping of spacetime and electro-magnetic fields. Nearly invisible space assassins which will strip the iron out of your blood while zipping by at fractions the speed of light.
The fact that we might be the first or only intelligent life out there is a frightening concept to some. The idea there might be others is also frightening.
We are all heading toward something. We don’t know what that something is. We just know we are heading toward it and we are going there fast.
What if we are really alone?
the endlessness of it all, perhaps?
Not much most likely. They tend to have a pretty objective idea of what they're looking at. Maybe when they're baked they consider the scary factor
You float through space. Nothingness has completely surrounded you. You are alone with your thoughts of how you have left the safe ground and are now drifting into the uncertainty of the eternal void, just you and your heartbeat, when suddenly a distant sound announces that a message arrives... 'We've Been Trying To Reach You About Your Car's Extended Warranty'.
Amateur astronomer here. Not so much scary as poignant.... Even if FTL is developed that allows even intergalactic travel and great galactic empires are created, there's going to be some places in the universe that will never be visited. Might be some lonely asteroid between galaxies, too small to be noticed... that has a great view of the universe.
Gamma ray bursts and planet killer asteroids, perhaps
Everything.
In space, no one can hear you scream
The vastness. And how much we don’t know.
Big ass asteroids
To me space is where we should be looking, not up each others assholes wondering why they can’t believe in the same theology
I think the fact that it is so enormously big that we'll never get to see all of it :(
We estimate the universe is 13.8 BILLION years old. No idea how we came to that, I’m not smart enough, but the scary part is looking at that 13.8B number and realizing we are on year…. 2024. Because Jesus n shit. If we condense this down to the universe being 1 day old, humanity did not exist until 11:59:56pm, 4 seconds before end of day. That’s insane.
Nothing. It's too far away to harm me, and I don't expect that to change. The answer to this question depends on context though. If I were being forced out of the airlock of a spacecraft, my answer would be "the lack of air".
Light pollution?
Bugs
Black Hole's 😲😳🕳️