The Beautiful Horror of Deep Space

Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.
-- Arthur C. Clarke

If the world was ending, and you could save only one hundred and sixteen images as the final record of planet Earth, what kind of moments would you preserve?

This is an actual question NASA faced in 1977, when they decided to attach to the Voyager spacecrafts golden records encoded with a selection of photos intended to immortalize life on our fragile planet. And when I look at these pictures, which have now left our solar system and are hurtling out into the cosmic dark, I can’t get out of my head how they will probably be all that’s left of us one day. In the vacuum of space, these images could last for billions of years, outliving the earth, outliving the sun.

And though that should maybe be comforting… I think it scares me.

0:00 Fear of Deep Space
1:06 Gazing into the Abyss
3:52 A Dog Named Laika
7:24 Under a Star Called Sun
9:54 True Emptiness
11:28 Signaling Aliens
13:57 Dark Forest Hypothesis
16:22 Pale Blue Dot
18:55 Space Madness
20:20 The Year Without Summer
22:22 End of the Universe

Media Shown: 2001 A Space Odyssey, Solaris, Outer Wilds, Silent Running, High Life, Under a Star Called Sun, Star Wars, Star Trek, The Expanse, The Anglerfish Project, A Trip to the Moon, From Earth to the Moon, Mars and Beyond, War of the Worlds, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Alien, Alien: Covenant, Alien: Isolation, Deep Impact

♫ Music Used – Left Alone – Ending Theme 2 (Detention), Komorebi (Gris), Windmill (Gris), Unagi (Gris), Sevastopol Abandoned (Alien: Isolation), Alien Reveal (Alien: Isolation), The Sun Station (Outer Wilds), 14.3 Billion Years (Outer Wilds), Back and Forth (Cloud Gardens), Kinds of Flowers (Voyager’s Golden Record)

Bittersweet
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

SOURCES:

Copyright Disclaimer: Under section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for “fair use” for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, education, and research. All video/image content is edited under fair use rights for reasons of commentary. I do not own the images, music, or footage used in this video. All rights and credit goes to the original owners.

[allisonhomiak]

Reading Laika's Wikipedia article has ruined me.

"Before the launch one of the mission scientists took Laika home to play with his children. In a book chronicling the story of Soviet space medicine, Vladimir Yazdovsky wrote, 'Laika was quiet and charming ... I wanted to do something nice for her: She had so little time left to live.'"

"One of the technicians preparing the capsule before final liftoff: 'After placing Laika in the container and before closing the hatch, we kissed her nose and wished her bon voyage, knowing that she would not survive the flight.'"

"In 1998, after the collapse of the Soviet regime, Oleg Gazenko, one of the scientists responsible for sending Laika into space, expressed regret for allowing her to die: 'Work with animals is a source of suffering to all of us. We treat them like babies who cannot speak. The more time passes, the more I'm sorry about it. We shouldn't have done it ... We did not learn enough from this mission to justify the death of the dog.'"

[HlootooThunderhammer]

Deep Sea and Deep Space are truly sisters in how they frighten us in much of the same ways: dark, cold, quiet, vast and void, humans floating almost helplessly when placed in them. Truly twins separated from birth.

[CygnusX-]

The most terrifying aspect of space is how deafeningly silent it is, despite all the mind boggling stuff going on out there.

[soraskingdom]

The way my heart sunk into my stomach when you told the story of the Laika... I just pictured myself in her position, frightened confused... betrayed.... she looked soo excited. the poor thing could never imagine in centuries of evolution what was going to happen to her. With no way to conceptualize what was happening, all that remained was primal fear. This is going to keep me up.

All that said, your growth as a creator on this platform is just inspiring to watch. You are an incredible storyteller.

[oPHILOSORAPTORo]

Ultron: "They're doomed."
Vision: "Yes. But a thing isn't beautiful because it lasts."

[AlesdairProductions]

19:18 Fun fact: Jules Verne's calculations for reaching the Moon were actually pretty accurate, which surprised many NASA scientists.

[Imurai]

"What scares us about space?"
You and Kurtzgesagt endlessly making nightmarefuel essays does.

[ElysiumCreator]

I don’t know why, but even though No Man’s Sky is by no means a scary game, just looking out into the abyss, it always gives me chills.

[Idras]

"The trajectory of this ship is unchanging.

I'm still going to water the plants."

I'm going to cry.

[theuday]

Why do people have cosmophobia, Let cosmos get married smh

[tarryncooper]

The story of Lyka is so heartbreaking. Every single clip or picture of her, she looked SO happy to be involved.... 😢😢😢

[hyperturbotechnomike]

After you brought up outer wilds, i had to think about the countless hours i spent playing No Man's Sky with my family. We play on a shared save file that is four years old, since this game has true multiplayer. In those four years, we accomplished a lot. Our "home" bases are in the 239th Galaxy, but we have countless others, discovered thousands of star systems. But when i zoom out of the galaxy map and see the tiny pixels which are our clusters, not even the individual systems, it also shows how little we accomplished. Combined ~3000 hours of four people reduced to maybe 10 tiny pixels on a 4K screen. No one will ever find our large bases we built. No one will ever find our amazing rare paradise planets. No one will ever find our resource hotspots. Despite them all being saved on a giant server with many people. I don't know if there ever was another player traveling nearby and almost made contact with us.

In those four years, there were only two instances of a stranger visiting our base and they only did after seeing them on the galactic teleporter of the anomaly and randomly chose them. It's a 1 in a Billion chance.

[sada]

For some reason, I've never been scared by the vastness of space. It's big, it's vast, and to me it's inviting. Anything could be out there, and that is amazing to me.

[_Wanderlustminded]

The idea of being confronted with the unknown of an endless universe and feeling so insignificant you become desperate to hang onto memories of people, places, or things in your life that gave you meaning and making the most of a seemingly meaningless existence while you can knowing it's all in vain never fails to make me cry. The concept has so much potential for angst, tragedy, and hope.

[SamM-glzc]

It IS pretty wild to think that if somebody ever were to actually stumble across Voyager, it's almost guaranteed that it will be long after humanity is but a memory.

[ianmckinzie]

Dude. Your writing in this episode was phenomenal.

[october]

Maybe I'm weird but I kind of love how small and impermanent everything is. It feels like a good poem, or a book where each tiny detail is for beauty rather than some greater real world purpose.

[alphamasterevi]

Since the age of 11, I've actually dreamed about exploring the Deep Space all alone with a computer that helps me to analyze what I found or didn't find.
This is oddly comforting ( ๑>ᴗ<๑ ) And when I die, I eventually become one with the universe again - atom for atom.

[burymeintulips]

I often fantasize about drifting through space, alone. I see it as beautiful and peaceful. Just how expansive it is, and the entire mystery of it. I think it's comforting knowing that death is something everything in the universe shares, even non-organic objects. People die, animals die, microbes die, planets die, stars die, and eventually the universe will too. No one is here forever, and even the human race isn't here forever. I feel like a lot of people don't grasp the concept, and vision of how small we really are.

I think Adventure Time plays a big part in how comfortable I feel about the expansiveness, and mortality of the universe. In the show they portrayed it in a very beautiful but real way.

[justinweber]

That ending reminds me a line/story from one of the Billy the Kid movies.

"Three men are playing cards when the apocalypse begins. The first man says hes going to the Church to pray, the second man that hes going to spend all the money he has on women and alcohol, and party until the end comes.

The third man calmly states "i shall finish the game.""