[WARNING! In this video I give you a lot of reasons to be scared of space!
If you are already scared of space, this might not be the video for you!
If you aren't scared of space, this video might change that! This fully didn't occur
to me when I scripted it because I love space, but Blue told me we needed a content warning,
which is a pretty good sign that we definitely needed a content warning.
So be warned: this video about how space is scary might convince you that space… is scary.]
Experts around the world agree that humans… look up sometimes. In fact,
looking up is one of our species's favorite hobbies, and has been highly popular for as
long as we've had suitably flexible spines and apex predators that know how to climb. But "up"
is more than just a fun direction tigers sometimes come out of: "up" is also where space is. Space
is also in every other direction, but you can forgive an early human for not guessing that.
And space is very exciting from a worldbuilding standpoint! Our built-in sleep schedule aligns
with the day-night cycle defined by the sun rising and setting every basically-24 hours, so the sky
is kind of foundational to some pretty important human stuff. The sun definitely commands the most
attention on a day-to-day basis, but the night sky presents intrigue and mystery. A nearly-static
pattern of sparkling lights that ever-so-slightly shifts every night, but the pattern of the stars
always matches the season and changes at the same constant rate as the year's weather patterns. The
sky always looks the same when it's cold and it always looks the same when it's hot and it always
looks the same when the flowers come back. Clearly, it has to mean something. What are those
lights? Are they the campfires of our ancestors? The chariots of the gods? Memorials to long-dead
heroes and monsters? Why do some of them move around sometimes? That's not even touching on
the moon! Good grief, how do we get anything done around here? There's so many questions!
Of course, questions beget investigation and investigation eventually produces answers.
The stars change at the same rate as the yearly seasons because they're affected by the same thing
- the earth's position relative to the sun. As the earth orbits the sun, our axial tilt exposes
us to a fluctuating amount of sunlight while also pointing us at a different section of sky
every night. Those extra-bright wandering stars were actually other planets that also orbited the
sun - thought there was, of course, some debate over this, as the idea that the known universe
orbited the sun instead of the earth called into question the seemingly ironclad thesis that the
earth was the de facto center of the universe and the most important thing around. I mean, it had to
be. It's where we live! This position got less and less defensible as it became clear that the stars
were not sparkly mica chips adorning the inside of a massive sphere with us at the center, but, in
fact, more suns, just as big and sometimes bigger than our own shiny number and incomprehensibly far
away. With each new revelation, the known universe got more and more vast, and earth's place in that
universe started to look a lot less centralized and a lot more teeny-weeny. But this was also
exciting. If space was a place rather than a pretty skybox or a crystal sphere or something,
then we could go there. We could explore. And who knew what we would find? Maybe more people,
just like us! Or excitingly hostile worlds to explore, ray-gun in hand! If every star was a sun,
who knew how many earths could be out there? Who else had been out there? What had they seen? What
had they built? Why hadn't they called us? But as the picture got clearer, it became
increasingly obvious that space wasn't a thriving ecosystem of exciting aliens, humanoid or
otherwise. It was airless, irradiated, and - most dishearteningly - everything was really, really
far away. Far from hopping in your high-tech personal spaceship with your bubble helmet and
form-fitting spacesuit and jetting off to mars to hang out with their exotic martian queen,
space travel was slow, claustrophobic, physically and mentally taxing… and unrewarding. Space was…
quiet. Everywhere that looked exciting was much too far away to reach in a human lifetime, or
even ten human lifetimes, and the things that made them exciting usually also made them incredibly
hostile to human survival. And not just hostile - incomprehensible. There were things in space
that were so much bigger than the entire planet earth that the laws of physics that affected them
were things we'd never seen before because they don't happen on the scale we experience
anywhere on this planet. Black holes, where the gravity is so strong that their escape velocity is
higher than the speed of light, had been theorized to exist since people first figured out that there
was a speed of light, but "guessing they existed" was not the same thing as seeing the damn things
bending spacetime around them. And the concept of radiation only really started to be understood in,
like, 1900, which is pretty rough considering stars are radioactive nuclear furnaces and we
were trying to get all up close and personal with them while we'd barely just figured out that they
could turn our DNA inside out. We started to realize that space was so enormously vast and
so far outside the scale of anything we were familiar with we could barely even understand
what we were dealing with out there, and a lot of what we were dealing with was turning out to be
startlingly good at killing us. It was impossibly enormous, terrifyingly deadly… and eerily silent.
Sci fi writers busily got started on imagining warp drives and hyperspace and stargates that'd
let their fictional space explorers bypass that tedious speed-of-light thing and actually get
somewhere before dying of old age, but on the flip side, a new trend began to emerge in fiction:
space… was really, really creepy. Not just creepy - existentially disturbing. It hit
that perfect balance of claustrophobia and agoraphobia - space is so deadly
that you can only survive in a shielded, pressurized, terrifyingly fragile vessel,
usually cramped and disorienting, and outside that vessel is millions of miles of nothing
and the nothing really wants you dead. Space, the final frontier, was absolutely terrifying.
Now, for all the reasons we've just discussed, space makes a great horror setting. In fact,
it's almost too good at being a horror setting, because it's scary on almost every possible level.
So when it gets used for horror, the writer usually needs to narrow down what specific
facet of space they'll be exploring for horror. One of the earliest popular subgenres of space
horror was the Alien Invasion. This was a common anxiety in early sci-fi that has since lost
popularity somewhat. Structurally, it was very simple: space was really big, full of other stars
and planets potentially just like ours. WE were alive, and historically known to indulge in the
odd bout of being colonizing bastards, so it was reasonable to speculate that somewhere out there
in the cosmos there could be other colonizing bastards, with better guns! These stories gave
audiences an easy bad guy to unconditionally hate - a horde of incomprehensible alien creatures
descending from the previously inoffensive heavens to give us the ol' British Navy Special for their
own nefarious purposes! Early alien invasion stories usually featured aliens as a terrifyingly
superior foe to be fought in total war, but later stories featured more subtle invasions by things
like bodysnatchers or pod people who could replace your neighbors with you being none the wiser,
and ever-so-coincidentally this happened to be happening at the same time as the Red Scare.
Because it's kind of awkward when the scary evil aliens are just doing what we did more
efficiently, but it's okay when the scary evil aliens are doing what those jerks over there did.
Still, the cut-and-dry alien invasion story found itself being subverted more
and more - some stories instead painted the alien "invader" as more of a "first
contact" situation that humans royally beef by being all paranoid and tribal about it, suggesting
that the reason space seems so quiet is because all the cool aliens think we're jerks. In other
stories the "invasion" is less of a coordinated attack force and more of a single threat,
like a single very dangerous alien or something like a space plague or really weird meteor. In
simple cases these things just kill people, but in more lovecraftian stories they might be something
from so far outside our world's paradigm that just by its nature it does completely incomprehensible
stuff to the people and things around it, and by the time anyone figures out what it's doing it's
already been doing it. This creeping dread at an alien corruption is more popular nowadays than the
invading alien army approach, but they all kind of embody the same general principle: something
alive comes from space - and it's a problem. But alien invasion stories almost always happen
on earth - otherwise they wouldn't really be invasions. In stories set in space,
the horror focus will often draw on Environmental Isolation. As discussed, being in space is
claustrophobic and agoraphobic all at once. Most horror stories involve a character being trapped
and isolated in a bad situation, hence explaining why they don't just call for help or run away from
the monster - and space horror takes that to its logical conclusion. Why don't they run? Because
there's nowhere to go. Why don't they call for help? Because there's nobody around for millions
of miles! And while they're dealing with the scary space monster they'd better hope the ship doesn't
get damaged too badly, because that tiny bubble of habitable space is very fragile and once the
air gets out of it it's a lot more difficult to put it back in. While horror stories set on earth
often end with the cops showing up or the cavalry arriving to rescue the surviving protagonists,
horror stories in space can be rather more unforgiving. Sometimes the space police show
up to help, but sometimes the best the characters can hope for is putting themself in cryosleep and
hoping someone hears their distress call before they drift into the sun. Space is pretty close
to the bottom of the list of "places I'd want to try fighting a monster." The archetypical
example of this is obviously Alien, where the hero is stuck playing cat and mouse
with the unholy offspring of a gimp suit and a velociraptor and her job would be a lot easier
if she wasn't stuck with it with nowhere to go. But back closer to home, we find an odd cousin of
the "space horror" genre that combines it with the "save the world" plotline to form Something Really
Big Is Falling Towards The Planet. This might sound oddly specific and look a little less like
space horror, but it draws from similar anxieties as the alien invasion. Space is very, very big,
and we know there's a lot of stuff out there in it - it can just be hard to get to that stuff.
In fact, we know from our own fossil record that stuff from space has hit the earth before,
and in one noteworthy case did a pretty good job of wiping out all life on earth. Well,
75%. Still not bad for a giant rock. So space is really big and it's full of other really
big stuff, some of it moving very fast. It's reasonable to worry that some of that really big
stuff might hit us someday. NASA certainly thinks so, as they keep very careful watch on all the
big near-earth objects that would potentially be a problem if their orbit ever got too cozy
with ours. Now before I give anyone nightmares, this is the kind of problem that NASA spends a
lot of time and energy and money focusing on so they can keep it from becoming a problem,
and it is not a problem any of us regular johnnies need to lie awake at night stressing over. Okay?
Cool. But in fiction, giant scary space rocks are a thrilling and/or melancholic action-driving plot
device. The horror of this story format comes from space and draws on some major stars of
the space horror tropes - incomprehensible vastness, a sense of powerlessness in the
face of the void - but rather than playing these up for active horror, these stories tend to be
more melancholy or action-y than standard space horror. In melancholic settings the story might
be more about how the characters cope with the seemingly inevitable destruction of the world,
while in action-y settings they usually have to go blow up or otherwise defeat the giant space rock
before it gets any ideas on upstaging the moon. Next up, back in actual space, we get stories of
the format We Found Something Really Weird. A constant danger of exploration is the risk of
finding stuff we don't understand that turns out to be much more dangerous than we're prepared for,
or that has weird and scary effects we don't know how to deal with. Creepy artifacts with Bad Vibe
auras, things that turn out to be part of alien reproductive cycles, an ancient space ruin that's
totally silent but not as empty as it looks, etc etc. These things often kick off horror plots by
being actively very bad to be around, but they have varying degrees of individual malevolence
- think the spectrum of cursed artifacts. Some of them are actively hostile, some are just passively
radioactive, some aren't actually all that bad - they just kick off the inciting incident. This
variant is very popular in video games, probably because it's a really good premise for interesting
environment design, collectible macguffins, and enemies for the protagonists to shoot en masse.
And just one half-step away from that is Turns Out Space Itself Is Really Weird. As astronomy and
space exploration has been a constant process of learning new, increasingly unsettling information
about what space is and how it works, this sentiment is grounded in the very real experience
of studying the cosmos as a whole. Turns out stars aren't just points of light, they're suns,
just really far away ones! Except for these stars, which are actually planets. And this one,
which is actually a whole galaxy full of hundreds of billions of stars. And these two,
which are actually the same galaxy but there's a very strong source of gravity between us and it,
like a black hole, and the gravitational lensing is causing the galaxy's image to be distorted from
our perspective, because that's a thing that can happen. Oh, what's a black hole? Glad you asked!
See, they used to be called "Dark Stars" when they were theorized in 1784, but actually they're just
objects with such strong gravity that not even light can escape them and they also might have
collapsed into a zero-dimensional singularity that has functionally no physical properties other than
their mass, charge and angular momentum! So how do we know they're even there? Well, by how much they
f*ck up everything around them, of course! See, with real stuff this unnerving it's no wonder
that fiction ratchets it back and just makes it so space is hell or something. Considering
that the history of space discovery has been one deeply unsettling discovery after another,
it's fully reasonable for a writer to speculate that launching ourselves into space willy-nilly
might result in finding some more new and exciting thing we don't understand that can warp us or kill
us in new and fascinating ways, and it's just as reasonable for them to speculate that space itself
might be in some way warped and kill-happy. It's quite common for writers to specifically explore
this concept in the context of wormholes, warp drives, hyperspace and all the other
bits of sci-fi spec fic designed to circumvent certain inflexible physical laws to enable happy
fun-time space adventures without that killjoy Speed Of Light getting in the way. The idea that
bypassing a fundamental law of reality might have some, to use the technical term, f*cky
consequences is pretty popular. Even in settings where it isn't exactly space, it's common for
any kind of transdimensional gateway network or spooky zero-gravity hell dimension to be at least
kinda deeply unnerving to deal with. In stories like this, passing through a wormhole or switching
on a warp drive for the first time can come with some very unpleasant unintended consequences. This
can be comparatively tame, like in Larry Niven's version of hyperspace travel, where the space
outside the ship in transit is complete blank nothingness, like the observer's blind spot is
covering the window at all times, and it's really creepy - and it can also be blindingly unsubtle,
like in Event Horizon, where opening a wormhole turned out to literally transport the ship to
physical actual hell, at which point it very considerately brought some hell back to share
with the class. This can even work in stories with only space-like settings, like ReBoot,
which is set entirely in a computer and thus has no access to real space, but substitutes in The
Web, a spooky zero-gravity chaos dimension that will degrade and corrupt anyone who goes into it
without suitable shielding, probably from all the popup ads and twitter discourse. In short,
when it comes to "space as a horror setting," the idea that space itself is the enemy is a very
popular concept for pretty self-evident reasons. Now, as a setting trope, "space horror" doesn't
actually dictate much about the plot, but it does come with a set of standard plothooks
that can draw an unwitting protagonist into a really bad situation. Space-horror protagonists
will frequently be roped into the plot because something out in space went wrong and they've
been called in to help or at least investigate to figure out what went wrong and how they can stop
it from going wrong again in the future. Then when they get there, surprise, turns out the thing that
went wrong was one of about a million different horrible possibilities that are still very much
present and threatening and their new goal is to survive and escape to avoid meeting the same fate
as the first guys. Sometimes they're supposed to be on a rescue mission, but they don't need
to bother, it literally never goes well. Best case scenario the rescue-ee is already dead.
Most suspicious scenario, the rescue-ee seems oddly unscathed. Either way it never works out.
As a horror setting, space has one major advantage over its competitors: scale. The
biggest thing about space is that there's so much space in it. Threats can be planet-sized, empires
can span galaxies, threats can have consumed whole worlds before reaching earth. In contrast,
most other horror stories are by necessity limited in scale, at least when it comes to
the horror itself - a slasher film's horror is one guy, a monster movie's horror is one monster, even
a disaster movie generally focuses down on how a tiny core cast handles one environmental threat,
often in a purposefully claustrophobic environment to highlight how the goal is to escape. The threat
might be a globe-spanning zombie plague but the setpiece will be a cramped hospital, a train,
etcetera. The story relies on claustrophobia, because in order for the threat to be threatening,
the heroes have to be trapped with it, and that in turn implies that the goal of the heroes is
to escape. Space, on the other hand, has the ability to trap the character with open space.
It's not that there's nowhere to run - there's a whole universe out there. It just won't help
you. This actually applies even in alien horror that takes place on earth, because the threat
is usually something from the stars that threatens to make the earth uninhabitable - and even if the
threat is smaller-scale, the fact that a nightmare dropped out of the sky with no warning once means
it could easily happen again. Space becomes the world's biggest source of constant anxiety. It's
no longer a mysterious and inviting source of wanderlust encouraging us to explore a vast and
beautiful universe and spread across the stars - it's a cold, airless, radioactive void just
waiting to drop bodysnatchers and viruses and mutative alien parasites or swallow up our tiny
starships and spit them out warped into something monstrous and unrecognizable, and to make matters
worse, it's got us surrounded. It catches us staring into the void and makes us flinch.
Now this is not quite unique to space, but non-space horror needs to do a bit of heavy
lifting to produce the same feeling of being trapped by the very environment.
Global disaster movies often do a very good job of convincing the audience that there's
nowhere fully safe to run because the crisis is everywhere, but in most horror stories,
running is still the ultimate goal - even if the crisis is global, there's somewhere that's
safer than here. An island, an aircraft carrier, a defensible military base, a facility researching
a cure - there needs to be something, because if the heroes have nowhere to run, the audience
has nothing to root for. And sometimes that's the point - maybe the heroes can't run so they fight
or hide or hole up and build the best life they can under the circumstances, or maybe
the story isn't actually about them surviving but is instead about communicating some other
goal like emotional catharsis or character development or a message on the fundamental
nature of humanity or society or something. But in space, there's never anywhere to run,
at least not on a practical timescale. Running is categorically not on the table. In space horror,
there are always two monsters - the actual monster and the cold unfeeling void. Running from one will
just let the other one eat you. Instead, our heroes have to manage both threats - frequently
with a convenient "let's you and him fight" by kicking the monster out of the airlock so it can
deal with space instead. You know what they say, you don't need to outrun the freezing void of
space, you just need to outrun the xenomorph you threw into the freezing void of space.
Or something. So… yeah!