The Terrors of Outer Space and Deep Time

Consciousness is the root of cosmic horror

AI-generated image by omar sahel from Pixabay

Each of the familiar dimensions of physicality is a source of terror when taken to its extremes, from the unimaginable gulf of outer space to the primordial and futuristic depths of time.

But when we imagine these cosmic horrors, we’re often tantalized by visions of inhumanity transpiring far away or in the distant past or future. We draw up a dichotomy between the comforts of home and the alienness of what’s potentially distant and unknown.

All that exists we used to mistake for our home because in our naïve self-assurance we had no concept of that which fully outstrips our comprehension. What there was to know was encompassed by what we sensed and intuited, as in the animistic and polytheistic personifications of nature, and the earth beneath us was deemed cosmically central because of an illusion of perspective.

Thus, there was no cosmic horror because there was no humiliating conception of outer space or deep time. Then we discovered that ours is just one of many star systems, and that our time to shine in history is only one sliver of a vast evolutionary history of life.

The stuff of cosmic horror

These newfound cosmic depths haunt us partly because of our primitive aversion to the unknown and our fear of missing out. With trillions of other stars and planets, there are countless places we’ll never go and eras that alienate us with their foreign norms. The implications are dire for any complacent assessment of human worth.

Our importance diminishes as we graduate from theistic naivety to rational enlightenment. For one thing, there’s no longer an all-seeing judge or father figure who appreciates us, and along with our pets and livestock, we’re the only ones who affirm the preciousness of human life.

The fear of the unknown, however, stems from a false dichotomy because nature’s inhuman dimensions are only multiplications of the spaces and times that establish our home territories. The contents of distant galaxies or eras may be unknown to us, but the naturalness of everything unifies those unknowns with what’s familiar. Quantitatively, to arrive at a distant star, you’d just have to keep putting one foot in front of the other, as it were. Likewise, we can add to or subtract from our remembered moments to arrive at times that would be familiar only to inhabitants of a distant age.

Faraway places and times aren’t inherently more monstrous than the local places and times that comfort us. Instead, what’s monstrous in nature is that our homes, too, are fundamentally physical and inhuman, and that barrenness or void of inner life at the atomic level is only compounded as we reach those far-flung locales in our imagination.

The horror of outer space is that because the number of stars, for example, is astronomical and wildly absurd, meaning that this number is an affront to the smallness of human intuition, our star must be monstrous, too, because it defies our mammalian inclination to socialize with it. And the horror of deep time is that because the universe’s present age of 13.7 billions years is appalling, and its ultimate duration is even worse, the period we call home or the “Anthropocene” must be only superficially reassuring in its familiarity.

Again, just accumulate enough of those familiar kilometers or moments, and you will end up at Alpha Centauri or at the Jurassic period or an inhospitable future age when all the starlight has gone out.

Consciousness is the culprit

The source of cosmic horror, then, is consciousness itself since this is the chief divider.

The fact that Alpha Centauri is closer to Earth than Barnard’s Star is objective and doesn’t depend on us. We can choose the notation or the unit of measurement, but once selected, nature determines its patterns. Yet our tribal consciousness divides the world into us and them, home and beyond, by preferring the familiar to what we haven’t assimilated to our array of affordances.

And consciousness structures the temporal A-series, meaning the sense that time flows from the past to the present and the future. If we fear what’s beyond our home’s borders (whether our home is defined as our personal abode or our country, continent, or planet), and if we’re nauseated by the thought of what lies far from the present moment that reassures us by including us within it, these reactions begin with the perspectival structure of consciousness. Embodied consciousness identifies itself with what’s here and now and is thus alienated from whatever’s there and then.

Overcoming cosmic horror would require an expansive view of ourselves, a view that was once supported by theistic religions. You just presumed that everything’s spiritual like us, or that a divine person holds the universe in his hands, so there was nothing beyond the pinnacle of consciousness. Again, with nothing like a Cartesian dichotomy between mind and matter, you had no ingredients for cosmic horror. Instead, the premodern fears were tribal in a parochial sense since you could still fear and loathe foreigners, such as demons or infidels.

A more viable expansive view of the relation between nature and consciousness would usher us into a transhuman mindset, as we’d disenchant consciousness, solving the “hard problem,” and we’d understand how consciousness is part of a continuum that includes nonlife. In that case, our technologies that extend our reach would be comparable to nature’s wild ventures with emergent constructs. We’d lose our tribal or egoic identity and understand how we could occupy the role of an enlightened force of nature.

Until then, our informed imagination will terrorize us with knowledge of what’s beyond us and of what thus threatens our constructs with the prospect of their inferiority or insignificance. The universe is absurdly vast, so the mundane conception of our species must be a flimsy conceit that can’t withstand the onslaught of scientific objectification. When consciousness, too, is objectified, we’ll have lost the root duality not because of any naïve mental projection, as in religion, but because we’ll have understood the thingness of our mental interiority. Life would then be akin to death, and death to life.

Cosmic horrors in space and time

Let’s apply the above to some examples of cosmic horror, beginning with space.

Think of how great the distances are even on our planet. It takes around a day to fly from New York City to Sidney, Australia. Before the invention of planes or boats that could navigate the oceans, such a journey would have been unimaginable, and indeed our intuitions are geared to conceptualizing much smaller distances, namely those that define what we think of as our home territory. Chipmunks have much smaller habitats than whales, and their intuitions of what counts as a natural unit of spatial measurement would differ from ours because of how we evolved.

But did you know that although our Sun is only a medium-sized star, you can fit 1.3 million Earths inside the Sun’s volume? This is already a baffling difference in scale, compared to that long flight from the US to Australia. But the solar scale is nothing compared to what’s farther out in the universe.

Suppose you were immortal and could travel anywhere in space just by putting one foot in front of the other. Eventually, after such a journey across 18.2 billion light years, you might reach one of the largest known celestial objects, the supermassive black hole TON 618, which has a diameter of 390 billion km, compared to the Sun’s of around 1.4 million km. According to Perplexity, an AI chatbot I asked to do the math, this means that approximately 2.88 quadrillion Earths could fit inside the volume of TON 618.

Let me spell out, then, the horror of those figures. There’s perhaps no more intuitive distance for us than the length of a human foot. If we imagine an immortal human travelling to TON 618 by that entirely intuitive method of placing one foot in front of the other through outer space, we must suppose that this traveler would experience the greatest betrayal. Adding up the comforting lengths of human feet would lead this traveler to a perfectly inhuman celestial object, to something so large it makes this standard of foot-length ludicrous.

Essentially, the horror is that we’re smart enough to know our limits. We can imagine walking far enough to discover that this intuitive unit of measurement is misplaced, and indeed that some things that are counterintuitive nevertheless exist. Thus, the comfort we enjoy from thinking within the mental borders set by our intuitions must be illusory. What’s worse is that our relentless capacity for objectivity can force us to see through that illusion, and the result of that ruthless rationality is a sense of cosmic horror.

This horror, then, is produced by the conflict between intuition and objectivity, as our conscious preference for the familiarity of a home territory is assaulted by cosmic scales.

Now let’s think about time. We can turn to HP Lovecraft’s story “At the Mountains of Madness,” in which he tells of some explorers who discover an alien record of prehistory in which an elder race came to Earth only shortly after the Moon was formed, established an alien civilization that conflicted with other alien races, and created all terrestrial life on Earth as an afterthought.

Just as we can imagine encountering appalling strangeness somewhere we’ve never been, somewhere spatially removed from us — and thus nevertheless spatially connected to us — we can imagine such strangeness lurking in the distant past or future.

Again, just keep subtracting, say, minutes or hours from the present time, in 2024, and you’ll arrive at a primordial era when something astonishing might have happened such as the rise and fall of a titanic alien race that would have made a toy out of our species. And the narrowness of our conscious focus makes for this emphasis on the present that we associate with the inner home of our conscious self, a focus that’s distinct from our memories and our mental models of the future.

These are horrors that lie in plain sight, in that they’re present but not suitable for our small-minded selves. If we lived for much longer periods, we could take a greater sweep of nature’s transformations into account. Instead, the geological or universal changes that are occurring all around us seem like stabilities because they’re too slow for us to perceive.

We think in terms of hours, days, or perhaps years. The most broadminded of us might plan for decades. But the Earth evolves at a rate of eons. We can confirm the results of such changes, but we can’t stretch our minds to be comforted by the scale of things that underlies us. This means that even the ground beneath our feet, which we take daily for granted, is poised to alienate us when we reflect on the parochiality of our standards.

Our everyday units of measurement are fit only for human concerns, but humanity itself isn’t fit for the cosmos!

And we’re like Antonio Salieri in the film Amadeus, in being just clever enough to know we’re unfit, but not large-minded enough to overcome those inherent limits. At most perhaps we can fantasize about the transhuman race we’ll one day become, just many standard years away.