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Comment by Cannabat | Hacker News Reader

There's something about this image that almost brings tears to my eyes. It's so big. It's an order of magnitude larger than our ("our") Milky Way. And that little smear to the bottom-left? A whole galaxy with uncountable stars, but also just a few pixels.

Do we humans represent something greater? Are we just a smear of pixels, a trivialising of some incomprehensibly large object? Are we really just this small? Are we a galaxy to some other being in some microscopic dimension, imaged with technology of a totally alien nature? Maybe these aren't logical questions.

I mean, there are plenty of photos like this, where you can just barely begin to appreciate the scale of the visible universe, but yeah, this one just got me today.

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> There's something about this image that almost brings tears to my eyes. It's so big.

I can hardly look at the sky (at night) without getting a panic attack, for that exact reason: the enormity of it all. It scares me to death thinking about the time and the distances. And I never met people who have that too.

I feel that very profoundly, and always brings to my mind the phrase "And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."

why would a drop of water be afraid of the full cup? just drink it

Because the drop is sentient and the cup is an infinite ocean. Also you're saying the Great Old Ones should just consume us and I'm here for it.

One thought to give me the heebee-jeebees is imagining to fall into Jupiter. Temperature and pressure aside, the vastness and alienness of falling into an abyss of ammonia clouds for an eternity and plunging into an ocean of liquid metallic hydrogen is terrifying. I could not finish a 3-hour video game[1] set on that very environment. Too scary for me.

I alt-F4'd Space Engine in panic when I told it to zoom to a black hole and I saw this circle of emptyness rapidly opening in my screen and distorting the infinity of stars in the background. I swear I found a dozen other people on forums mentioning their phobia of black holes caused by Space Engine.

Space is scary. Everything outside Earth's atmosphere is by definition alien and unnatural. Yet so fascinating.

1: https://store.steampowered.com/app/773370/Exo_One/ (it's actually pretty good)

Literal cosmic horror; the realization of being a meaningless speck in an indifferent universe.

(I was today years old that that's a Dr. Strange quote, sigh. I thought it was more profound, lovecraftian or something).

Too me it isn't terrifying - it is exhilarating and liberating. We are just some crazy thing that happened - enjoy it regardless of what it all is.

If that cloud were conscious the way you and I are, it would probably be amazed that so much complexity could be compacted into such a tiny space as your brain, our world, teeming with equally complex life and intricate webs of interdependent systems to keep our little bundle of life running must be amazingly interesting to galaxy-sized systems such as that, although I bet it would be terrified of being compressed into such a finite size.

It's nice to see that some people share some of my fears. When I still played Kerbal Space Program it used to make me anxious, and even something like the landing zone selection in Rimworld can be a bit scary. I used to have nightmares about being in space too. I'm not that scared of the night sky but when looking at it while laying down and seeing nothing else it can be scary.

At least know that in that vast universe you're not alone in your fears!

You’re not alone! I’m the exact same way, it’s like I try to wrap my head around the enormity of what I see and I’m filled with terror. My wife thinks I’m insane that sometimes I imagine falling in a space suit toward Jupiter and I feel scared.

Also anytime there’s an article about the sheer size of the universe, trying to get you to understand the enormity, I feel my grip on reality start to lessen and have to pull myself back and stop thinking about it.

I’ve noticed the moon doesn’t cause similar anxiety, maybe because it’s so close and tangible compared to everything else?

I’ve never met a fellow astrophobe, either. Hang in there.

Sounds like existential anxiety type issue to me. You might study the stoics or learn to embrace nihilism to get past it. Once you accept how small and irrelevant you are in this big picture, you can stop worrying about success or "winning" and get on with things that are important to you.

Life in a galaxy is an inherently risky business.

Once we become less rocks-banging-on-rocks primitive, the first order of business will be to get the hell out of the galaxy.

Once we'll have the technology to move outside the galaxy, we'll be a Type-III civilisation on the Kardashev scale that will need to harvest an entire galaxy's worth of energy just to sustain itself. God itself would fear us.

(Unless you mean to move outside the Solar system. I've seen plenty people confuse the two.)

Ability to move operations outside the galaxy is probably available at Kardashev II.

Just moving out of the solar system would be pointless, except to obtain a ready supply of cold. We may expect cold to remain essential to anybody still bound by laws of thermodynamics.

The whole "Kardashev" business, anyway, comes from an extremely primitive outlook. Once a culture gets a handle on mass/energy conversion, relying on stars to provide process energy gets left behind, and other resource limits become important instead. Safety from nearby magnetar quakes and merging black holes, for example.

I just get sad thinking about the slow travel/trapped. Maybe someone will figure it out.

You might take comfort in, that it also puts a dampener on interstellar wars (my assumption).

It is sad.

But, on a flip side - somewhat tangentially, I've recently become interested in molecular biology. The strides we're making within the field is incredible.

Perhaps it isn't as sexy as astronomy, but it's far more within our grasp, and arguably has a far bigger impact on us, at least right now

Eventually, the human consciousness will move to a synthetic medium, and we will feel far less "trapped" as time will virtually cease to hold meaning.

I'm also intrigued thinking about a post-meat existence. But I think that while time will then not be measured in hours or days, we will be counting down the total energy available to us from Sol, and if it will suffice to bring us to a new star or other energy source.

There will always be an uncertain countdown.

This begs the question - is there a maximum "star cluster" size, beyond which a post-meat society on starship(s) would be unable to obtain more energy?

In essence, given some function that takes in:

- a graph of stars/blackholes (energy sources), with:

- the distances between each energy source

- the expected remaining lifetime of the source

- (optionally) the probable locations of new sources, and their expected time to maturity

and:

- a set of starships, with:

- the maximum material lifetime of the starship (e.g. of solar panels)

- the percentage of material renewal possible at each node

- the energy consumption of the starship

is there a finite longest path, that is meaningfully smaller than the universe?

And what is the probability that we will encounter a life-bearing planet on this path, which we will have to mine to oblivion to enable the renewal of our starship(s) for the survival of our own species?

There may exist extra timelike dimensions that can be a conduit for information. I hear that the ultrahyperbolic equations this leads to are difficult to comprehend.

Another way to see it is that while we are so small and irrelevant - enjoy the fact that we are irrelevant and yet we get all this.

Add to this the scale of time - just remember that in 500 million years after all evidence of us is long, long, LONG gone that the clouds will still form and the waves will still crash on the shore.

That we are here and potentially meaningless isn't something to fear, it is something to cherish.

> we are so small and irrelevant

I see it the other way around - we are the only thing that is relevant, and the rest of the universe isn’t. Yes, it is big (to put it mildly) and hostile, and some people feel that thinking about it is somehow “liberating,” which, in fact, is merely a fleeting illusion, because the excitement quickly passes as soon as you go back to your daily minutia and have to continue to put up with all the bullshit and what not that’s happening around you. (The thought of the impending death may be just as “liberating” except that it’s not and never has been. You simply go through you daily routine until, say, you get sick and die. That’s it.)

The daily routine until you get sick and die - that is true but there is something special in that in that it is just the way we are. Why should we expect anything more?

I've heard these kind of feelings many times and I find them particularly interesting because I've never felt anything like that

I think the feeling of being "minuscule" starts at a much lower scale. Who am I in this city? No one relevant. 40-50 people might feel sad if I die today. The remaining X million won't care. Does that make me feel bad or irrelevant? Not really...I'm relevant to 40-50 people and very relevant to my close family and friends.

I'm not too attached to the human species either. I think we have some great things, but even in terms of the earth we've only existed for a tiny bit (and maybe we won't be for much longer....100 thousand more years?). I'm also fine with that.

My hypothesis is that many people feel very strongly things like the soul is eternal or that humans have a unique and uber-important destiny in the universe. If you feel that, contemplating how minuscule we are when considering time-space will make you feel weird because it contradicts those very strong feelings.

If you think the size of the source object is large, consider the size of space its viewable from. If you see a spec of light from a star, that same spec is visible from every point on a sphere around it (ish)

Now consider the size of the sphere! It's amazing anything reach us at all.

I felt the same way recently reading about galaxy filaments and walls

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