The Deeper You Go In Space, The More Terrifying It Gets
The Sleepy Solstice
105,143 views
The edge of space sits only about one hundred kilometers above your head, closer than the next city over, and the moment you crossed that thin line the air would leave your lungs and the moisture on your tongue would begin to boil. Tonight we travel outward from that pale blue shell one threshold at a time, and at every step the fear changes its shape into something the last one could never have prepared you for, from the airless silence of the Moon to the seventy-thousand-year gulf between the stars, from the graveyard of a hundred billion suns to the great voids so empty they can convince a civilization it is alone, all the way to the cold and quiet end of time itself. But what if the most frightening thing about space was never what is out there, waiting in the dark, but how completely and how calmly it fails to notice that we are here at all?
This is a slow, patient walk down the ladder of cosmic scale, made for listening with your eyes closed. We move gently from the boundary of the sky to the far side of the Moon, through the near-empty reaches of the Solar System, across the interstellar dark where sunless worlds fall forever, out past the Milky Way and its silent neighbors, into the enormous emptinesses between the galaxies, and finally to the accelerating horizon that is carrying almost the entire universe permanently out of our reach. Along the way we sit with the strangest consolation the subject allows, which is that in all that indifferent immensity, we appear to be the one part of it that ever looked back and understood what it was seeing.
Get cozy, dim the lights, and let this quiet descent through the terror and the wonder of deep space keep you company tonight. Subscribe to The Sleepy Solstice if you enjoy taking the long way around the universe.
CHAPTERS
00:00 Introduction
01:14 The Line Above Your Head
13:06 The Night That Never Ends
24:39 The Dead Neighbor
35:15 The Emptiness Between Worlds
46:07 The Gulf Between Stars
57:32 The Wheel of a Hundred Billion Suns
1:08:33 One Grain Among Two Trillion
1:20:49 The Places Where Nothing Is
1:31:45 The Light That Is Already Dead
1:42:42 The Cold, Quiet End, and the Eye That Watched
SOURCES
arXiv — McDowell, "The Edge of Space: Revisiting the Kármán Line" (1807.07894) — https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.07894
NOAA NESDIS — "Where is space?" — https://www.nesdis.noaa.gov/news/wher...
NASA Science — "Earth's Atmosphere: A Multi-layered Cake" — https://science.nasa.gov/earth/earth-...
NASA APOD — "The Edge of Space" — https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap210724.html
NASA Technical Reports — "Delimitation of air space and outer space" — https://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?R=19...
ESO — "Orbit of Proxima Centauri Determined After 100 Years" — https://www.eso.org/public/announceme...
arXiv — "The (Half) Empty Universe" (astro-ph/9704026) — https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9704026
arXiv — "Voids in the Large-Scale Structure" (astro-ph/9702135) — https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9702135
arXiv — "The Laniakea supercluster of galaxies" (1409.0880) — https://arxiv.org/abs/1409.0880
NASA — "Mapping the Cosmic Web" — https://science.nasa.gov/mission/hubb...
Caltech NED — Hogg, "Distance measures in cosmology" — https://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/level5/H...
arXiv — "Expanding Confusion: common misconceptions of cosmological horizons" (astro-ph/0310808) — https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0310808
Reviews of Modern Physics — "A dying universe: the long-term fate and evolution of astrophysical objects" — https://journals.aps.org/rmp/abstract...
Astronomy & Astrophysics — "Planck 2018 results. VI. Cosmological parameters" — https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/pdf...
arXiv — "Recent advances in the determination of some Galactic constants" (1703.05822) — https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.05822
—
Disclaimer: This channel makes educational entertainment. All factual statements come from published research and recognized scientific organizations. Segments covering speculation, alternative theories, or the narrator's own interpretation are flagged as such within the video. The Sleepy Solstice does not report the news. Watch at your own discretion.
#InterstellarSpace #DeepSpace
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As above, so below
The Deeper You Go In Space, The More Terrifying It Gets
The Sleepy Solstice
105,143 views
The edge of space sits only about one hundred kilometers above your head, closer than the next city over, and the moment you crossed that thin line the air would leave your lungs and the moisture on your tongue would begin to boil. Tonight we travel outward from that pale blue shell one threshold at a time, and at every step the fear changes its shape into something the last one could never have prepared you for, from the airless silence of the Moon to the seventy-thousand-year gulf between the stars, from the graveyard of a hundred billion suns to the great voids so empty they can convince a civilization it is alone, all the way to the cold and quiet end of time itself. But what if the most frightening thing about space was never what is out there, waiting in the dark, but how completely and how calmly it fails to notice that we are here at all?
This is a slow, patient walk down the ladder of cosmic scale, made for listening with your eyes closed. We move gently from the boundary of the sky to the far side of the Moon, through the near-empty reaches of the Solar System, across the interstellar dark where sunless worlds fall forever, out past the Milky Way and its silent neighbors, into the enormous emptinesses between the galaxies, and finally to the accelerating horizon that is carrying almost the entire universe permanently out of our reach. Along the way we sit with the strangest consolation the subject allows, which is that in all that indifferent immensity, we appear to be the one part of it that ever looked back and understood what it was seeing.
Get cozy, dim the lights, and let this quiet descent through the terror and the wonder of deep space keep you company tonight. Subscribe to The Sleepy Solstice if you enjoy taking the long way around the universe.
CHAPTERS
00:00 Introduction
01:14 The Line Above Your Head
13:06 The Night That Never Ends
24:39 The Dead Neighbor
35:15 The Emptiness Between Worlds
46:07 The Gulf Between Stars
57:32 The Wheel of a Hundred Billion Suns
1:08:33 One Grain Among Two Trillion
1:20:49 The Places Where Nothing Is
1:31:45 The Light That Is Already Dead
1:42:42 The Cold, Quiet End, and the Eye That Watched
SOURCES
arXiv — McDowell, "The Edge of Space: Revisiting the Kármán Line" (1807.07894) — https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.07894
NOAA NESDIS — "Where is space?" — https://www.nesdis.noaa.gov/news/wher...
NASA Science — "Earth's Atmosphere: A Multi-layered Cake" — https://science.nasa.gov/earth/earth-...
NASA APOD — "The Edge of Space" — https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap210724.html
NASA Technical Reports — "Delimitation of air space and outer space" — https://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?R=19...
ESO — "Orbit of Proxima Centauri Determined After 100 Years" — https://www.eso.org/public/announceme...
arXiv — "The (Half) Empty Universe" (astro-ph/9704026) — https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9704026
arXiv — "Voids in the Large-Scale Structure" (astro-ph/9702135) — https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9702135
arXiv — "The Laniakea supercluster of galaxies" (1409.0880) — https://arxiv.org/abs/1409.0880
NASA — "Mapping the Cosmic Web" — https://science.nasa.gov/mission/hubb...
Caltech NED — Hogg, "Distance measures in cosmology" — https://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/level5/H...
arXiv — "Expanding Confusion: common misconceptions of cosmological horizons" (astro-ph/0310808) — https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0310808
Reviews of Modern Physics — "A dying universe: the long-term fate and evolution of astrophysical objects" — https://journals.aps.org/rmp/abstract...
Astronomy & Astrophysics — "Planck 2018 results. VI. Cosmological parameters" — https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/pdf...
arXiv — "Recent advances in the determination of some Galactic constants" (1703.05822) — https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.05822
—
Disclaimer: This channel makes educational entertainment. All factual statements come from published research and recognized scientific organizations. Segments covering speculation, alternative theories, or the narrator's own interpretation are flagged as such within the video. The Sleepy Solstice does not report the news. Watch at your own discretion.
#InterstellarSpace #DeepSpace