Space is scary.
Let’s face it: if I were to magically transport you to a completely random spot somewhere in the universe, chances are higher than 99.99999999 percent that you’d be dead within moments. Feel free to add some 9’s to those odds, too.
If you’re lucky—for a sufficiently broad definition of “lucky”—you’ll materialize over the surface of a star (or inside one) and be vaporized or near a black hole and be shredded by tides or on a planet with a poisonous atmosphere.
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That’s just the reality of it. Space is mostly empty, as near a vacuum as you care to argue, and what isn’t empty is decidedly, and terrifyingly, fatal. It’s rough out there.
That’s how it appears in fiction, too. In our literature, our movies and our imaginations, space is filled with aliens intent on stealing our water, our technology and our lives. Even the most mundane (yet still fictional) UFO story has an edge of creepy-crawliness to it.
Our perception of space is, perhaps, influenced by all this. Certainly there is beauty and awe to fill anyone’s soul, but does a chill draft blow through there as well, leeching ice into the spirit and sending a frisson of tingles down one’s spine?
Now combine that with pareidolia, the tendency for our brain to try to make patterns out of noise. Oh, certainly, we can see happy faces in clouds or a familiar religious icon in a piece of toast. But then there’s also that shadow in the corner of your bedroom at night that becomes a sinister presence. Swaying trees in a storm seem to reach for you—and were those words you heard on the howling wind?
The same sensorial subjectivity is true for objects in space. They take on all manners of shapes, and our brain…
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