Trope Talk: Space Horror

The first time I heard this Trope Talk, I thought that Red was speaking a little slower than she usually does, and I felt that really added to the gravity of the video's subject material. Don't get me wrong, I'm a fan of how fast Red usually talks and what it adds to the video, but even an error causing her speech to slow down even just a little really, in my opinion, added to the slow burn that many of these space horror movies use.

I am amused because I learned to be scared of space merely by watching a video of a night sky in a place where you can see the Milky Way. It instantly hit me just now insignificant we are to a universe that contains *that*, and that was the tip of the iceberg. I got made fun of relentlessly (high school never ends; I was in my late 20s). But through the years I spent time learning about space and my fear of it was greatly lessened, and now space doesn't scare me at all; not even the many realstic ways earth could be ended right now by, say, a supernova too close by, or a black hole forming such that the jets of destructive rays point exactly our way. The ocean though, that's a way more messed up place.

I'm reminded of a wonderful bit from early in Babylon 5. "I have just picked [this ant] up on the tip of my glove. If I put it down again and it asks another ant, 'What was that?!', how would it explain? There are things in the universe billions of years older than either of our races. They are vast, timeless, and if they are aware of us at all, it is as little more than ants, and we have as much chance of communicating with them as an ant has with us. We know. We've tried. And we've learned that we can either stay out from underfoot or be stepped on. They are a mystery, and I am both terrified and reassured to know that there are still wonders in the universe, that we have not explained everything."

We need to update the terminology used in government organisations and acronyms. For you people in the USA, start lobbying to have the people who shoot astronauts and probes into this dread realm renamed the National Air and Cold Unfeeling Void Agency.

Loved the video. Few science facts are more fun to me than the fact that we observe black holes by watching the breakdown of reality around them. Fun tidbit I think you’d be interested in Red: At least for contemporary Christians, the change to the heliocentric model was actually a big deal for the exact opposite of the reason that has become the cultural narrative. The idea that the earth was the center of the universe didn’t mean that it was the most important part, it meant that it was the least. The earth was a dirty ball of base mater cast off from the heavens, and the furthest thing from the full majesty of God. The havens were the Heavens, domain of the divine, both gods(or planetary Intelligences which were the classical gods cast into a basically monotheistic framework) and at the farthest reaches, God. So setting the earth into the Heavens was not lessening its place, it was an act of hubris so massive it would make Arachne blush. This is actually why in the Inferno Dante puts the worst thing imaginable, Satin’s genitalia, at the center of the Earth and therefor the universe. From what I understand the common idea was largely spread by the big wave of anticlerical historians in the 1700s and picked up because enlightenment era Europeans had a desperate need to believe they were the best humans ever, including both the peoples they were colonizing and there own ancestors.

As someone who deals with both anxiety and ptsd, the disclaimer is greatly apreciated!

you hit every reason why i'm not a fan of space, good job (no really, it was great!). favorite quote: ...playing cat and mouse with the unholy offspring of a gimp-suit and a velociraptor

Simon Fairchild would be proud

YAS! Reboot reference!

I love space