> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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 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.