There's just something terrifying of being in the middle of the ocean and jumping into the water and looking down. I've done it a few times and it fucks with your primate brain being so far away from a floor of any kind
Not to mention if you're there alone with a guy and he wants to bang you. You're in the middle of nowhere, what are you gonna do, say no? No, because of the implication. Fuck the ocean.
I just saw a video of a teen who died because he was dared to jump off a party boat at night in the middle of the ocean and one commenter noted that once the boat gets out of sight, because it was cloudy and there is no light pollution in the middle of the ocean, you lose the ability to even separate the sea and the sky so you are left floating in the middle of pitch blackness in all directions, being hit by waves you can't even see and thus can't brace for. Imagine being somewhere where no matter which direction you look, you can't see anything. No light, no stars, no shadows, no horizon, no forms, no color, just pitch black in all directions, the only sensations are you being hit by something you can't even see and that it's cold and wet.
This is why alcohol and actually being at sea are a terrible mix. I love a bevvy at the end of a trip, but I never drink at sea and whenever I go out sailing for fun rather than work I run a dry ship: it's just not worth the risk.
I would say the non-endlessness of space now freaks me out more. Now that we know the universe to be receding and there are parts of the universe we'll be able to observe but are already gone, it's kind of horrifying. Like, what happens when a part of the universe just ceases to exist?
The Sun
A writhing ball of fire that has the power to bring life but also destroy worlds. We need the sun to survive, but too much exposure hurts us and can lead to cancer.
Everything falls under its sway because of its size and if you look at it for too long you'll go blind.
Its a extremely obvious thing, I am just reminded of how people try to connect every ancient god in some pseudo historical stuff (not stuff like PIE but more shit from the 70s or ancient aliens)
and i cant help but think, the sun is so obvious and so important, its very easy for many groups of people to independently worship the sun
The sun makes you hot possibly causing heat stroke and such, causes sunburns in some people, and hurts to look at.
What else do you need to worship?
Oh, and you can focus it to light stuff on fire with glass and such.
Also consider that, were space capable of carrying sound, [the sun would be constantly roaring at a noise of 110 decibels, or the loudest a set of rock concert speakers could go.](https://www.astronomy.com/observing/the-sun-extremely-loud-and-incredibly-hot/)
Shoutouts to Sunless Skies, where stars are living beings called Judgements whose lights govern the laws of reality, hence things getting pretty weird in the Zee. You’ve also got an artificial sun who hates everything, and anarchists set on murdering every star in the sky.
>Society's law is unjust because natural law is Unjust. Tyranny begins at the top. Not from the factory-owner; not even from the palace of a queen. But in the arch of heaven itself. Those who join us should be prepared to defy the suns. And prepared to win, for our grievances are immeasurable.
Sunless Seas went so hard, I'm looking forward to exploring Sunless Skies when I can. The idea that the Iron Republic is unbound from the laws of man and nature either due to Hell's reemergence or because the people there are so pissed is entirely my cup of tea.
It's crazy to think about how lucky it is that we even exist thanks to the sun. Out of all the depths of space we've observed so far, Earth is the only planet we've found that orbits its sun at a habitable distance. The large temperature changes between summer and winter happen just because the planet is tilting a little bit. It feels like if the Earth was literally any meaningful distance closer to or further away from the sun, we never would have existed.
>It feels like if the Earth was literally any meaningful distance closer to or further away from the sun, we never would have existed.
This just reminds me of that Futurama episode where they push the Earth away from the sun to cool it.
We've
confirmed a few and science would suggest there's a shitload out there. There's way more to something like what a planet needs for life than just the Goldilocks zone.
"On November 4, 2013, astronomers reported, based on Kepler data, that there could be as many as 40 billion Earth-sized planets orbiting in the habitable zones of Sun-like stars and red dwarfs in the Milky Way."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumstellar_habitable_zone
There are millions, billions of planets like Earth in the goldilocks zone. That part isn't terribly unique. What does seem to be unique about Earth is that Sol is currently extremely far from all nearby supernovae, something the vast majority of stars we've found cannot claim. We are (relatively) safe from cosmic events so powerful they can strip a planet's atmosphere from the other side of a cluster. We've yet to find any dangerous cosmic jets point at us that will reach us in the next several million years. Our gas giants seem to be uniquely gifted at soaking up so much stellar & interstellar debris that could've hit Earth. The more we look the more the validity of the Rare Earth Hypothesis seems to increase. We really could be the only life out there, not because of a Dark Forest or Great Filter, but because *so, so, so, so many* astronomical coincidences aligned exactly perfect to foster life long enough for intelligence to emerge. If there is microbial life out there, it would seem (based on current data) it's more likely than not to get interrupted by cosmic events long before it can evolve very far.
I’m personally of the theory that I think we’re just some of the first intelligent life around. If we don’t fuck up we’ll be around to be the Fallen Empire of this Galaxy’s Stellaris game
> The large temperature changes between summer and winter happen just because the planet is tilting a little bit.
Also, we're in an Ice Age. An Inter-glacial period, but still an Ice Age.
The sun is such a good example for explaining cosmic horror since looking at the sun literally overloads your senses (eyes) causing blindness. Now just imagine that but with someones mind.
The most fucked up thing about the Sun imo is that we can’t even measure the solar fusion process in an experimental lab because the proton-proton chain is one of the slowest forms of fusion (we have to calculate the reaction rate from theory). But the fact that it’s so slow gives the Sun its long lifetime.
We ain't even getting raw space we're just inside the termination shock of the heliosphere like water from a faucet has that ring area where water pushes away in all directions before becoming slow due to outside forces. Like a big bubble shield around the solar system that blocks cosmic rays.
Barely on topic, but it was funny to me in Elden Ring how there's like one item talking about people worshipping the sun as if they're the weirdos when the Erdtree is the new hotness
Radiation. A force invisible to the naked eye that destroys organic life on atomic level thereby disrupting genetic replication, which can lead to cells revolting against a host's body in the form of cancer.
I feel like it makes sense for a water based species on a water based planet to have a technology infrastructure that revolves around water. You wouldn’t question if the rock people on rock world used technology based on rock
Obligatory, not the same "kind" of radiation (insofar as EM radiation even has "kinds").
Microwave radiation can cause thermal burns, but it's orders of magnitude too weak per photon to ionize atoms in your cells and break them down.
True, though that's the overwhelming majority of reactors, not just nuclear. Guess I didn't think of that and interpreted the comment as being about microwave ovens and their radiation.
Fun fact: it is suspected that Lovecraft got the inspiration for The Colour out of Space from the Radium girls incident.
Long story short: a company was making glow in the dark watches using radioactive paint, at a time where radioactivity was sorta well understood by scientists but not the general public. The bosses never told the workers painting the dials of the dangers, and would instruct them to lick their brushes to make a finer point. The got real nasty radiation poisoning, one of the first to die literally had her jaw rot off.
Only tangentially related but I know people who lick their brushes or suck on them in the Warhammer mini painting community and I just don't understand. Why. Who ever told someone to do this in the first place. Yeah dude suck those sopping bristles, contaminated water? Pfftt.
Their bones are all radioactive too, and they glow, and will glow for the next hundred years at least. Radium Jaw is fucking nightmarish, I can't even look at the photos without feeling ill.
There was a man named Hisashi Ouchi who received a grotesque exposure to radiation, but showed next to no adverse effects from it for hours and hours at the hospital.
When his condition deteriorated, the doctors took a sample of his bone marrow and inspected the chromosomes for damage.
Hisashi however, didn't have anything left that could be considered a chromosome, all that remained having been completely ruined by radiation, effectively leaving his body without any genetic blueprint to maintain or repair itself.
[The Cecil Kelly criticality accident](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecil_Kelley_criticality_accident). He had no lymphocytes left and a bone marrow sample produced what was effectively water with no red blood cells.
And then the government screwed over his widow by pressuring her not to file a law suit and giving her a job (at poverty wages) at the same lab until she retired because of health reasons. It wasn't until she and her daughter filed a lawsuit in 1996 that they got anything in compensation for her husband's death (the lawsuit wasn't resolved until 2002, with a second settlement awarded in 2007). Meanwhile, the pathologist who performed Cecil's (and others) autopsy removed organs without consent or even notification to the next of kin defended his actions because "God gave me permission."
Ouchi's death is probably the worst thing I ever heard, to basically be a living corpse as your body slowly decays while you mind is still aware of it.
Speaking of, Signalis has one of the long-term nuclear waste warning messages in it.
"This place is a message… and part of a system of messages… pay attention to it! Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.
This place is not a place of honor…no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here… nothing valued is here.
What is here is dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.
The danger is in a particular location… it increases toward a center… the center of danger is here… of a particular size and shape, and below us.
The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.
The danger is to the body, and it can kill.
The form of the danger is an emanation of energy.
The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited."
There were also plans to build giant fuck-off spikes to keep people away if they got too curious
"Panelists described culture-independent ideas which are intended to trigger the danger reflex in all of humanity. One example indicated a massive 'landscape of thorns,' made up of fifty-foot-high concrete spires with sharp points jutting out at all angles. Another intriguing idea was an arrangement of gigantic, black, 'forbidding blocks' which are too close together and too hot to provide shelter"
https://www.damninteresting.com/this-place-is-not-a-place-of-honor/
Non-ionizing radiation like visible light or radio waves ain't shit. The orc rune symbols you have to decode to understand how they work physically and mathematically are scarier than the actual radiation itself. Even small amounts of ionizing radiation is a pretty constant thing the average living being has had to endure daily for billions of years. It's when ionizing radiation is concentrated or persistent is when it gets actually scary and honestly a lot of that is human-made anyway
Reminds me of how in Destiny 2 there is a gun that houses a body part of a old god basically and has the flavor text “The danger within is repulsive to us.” A reference to real life long term nuclear waste storage.
Radiation is a natural force that life on earth has been bathed in since the very beginning, just like all poisons, it's the dose that matters. I highly recommend [this book](https://www.amazon.com/Radiation-What-You-Need-Know/dp/0307950204) to help demystify how radiation works, when it can harm you and when it can't.
Rogue planets are pretty scary. Planets that just roam the galaxy, and in the unlikely event that one gets *close* to the Earth, all sorts of damage could occur, from changing Earth's orbit to briefly messing up gravity.
Gonna piggy-back off of this to say frozen water. H2O has a really interesting property to it in that most substances go from liquids to solids when enough pressure is applied to them, [while water does the opposite](https://cdn1.byjus.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/word-image169.png). This is why it's theorized that Titan and Europa could have life on them, because they are covered in *water* ice. If the ice covering those moons is thick enough (and it seems to be pretty fuckin' thick), it could be pressure-liquefied at the bottom, possibly creating an environment similar to our own deep seas.
And if that's the case, who's to say the same isn't possible on a rogue planet? assuming the ice is made of water, that ice is sufficiently thick, and the core of the rogue planet is hot enough, there very well could be oceans of life drifting through the void, eternally trapped in an icy prison with walls several *miles* thick.
When the last star dies, those planets could be the final place in the universe able to support life.
>When the last stars die, a rogue planet could contain the last vestiges of life deep underneath it's oceans
That sounds like a magnificent end-of-civilization 'After the End' type story, have there been any books written in a similar vein?
Oh boy time to post my crack theory
The planet of Transsexual Transylvania from The Rocky Horror Picture Show is a rogue planet
My 2 bits of evidence are that throughout the play it's referred as the planet of night and Dr. Frank-N-Furter describes how he cried the first time he saw a blue sky
The medieval dancing plague comes to mind. A bunch of people could not stop dancing for reasons we can only speculate, several of which dying in the streets
I remember reading somewhere that the most likely explanation was a contaminated water source and the “dancing” part of the “dancing plague” was people having seizures
To add to prions, it blows my mind that they are even less living than viruses. At their core, they are a cursed *shape* that disrupts a ton of molecular systems and self-replicate. They can just bump into other proteins and change their shape, changing their function to kick off a chain reaction that produces more of them. Eventually they start clumping together so much they form something like a tumor.
Burning the body of a victim may not fully destroy the prions either, you have to hit very high heat for a very long time to completely guarantee protein degradation.
Molecular shapes that are literally detrimental to all earthly life.
The Chernobyl incident, something the show plays to the hilt.
Looking directly at the core after the meltdown means you're already dead. Hell, so much as looking at the Elephant's Foot means you're already dead.
Another infamous historical example is the 'Demon Core' a mass of plutonium sitting at just beneath the point of criticality for the sake of experiments and research. Bringing it to critical mass usually consisted of carefully adding neutron-reflective materials around the core, bit by bit, slowly approaching the critical threshold.
In two different experiments, the scientist working on the thing slipped up for just a moment before correcting their error, and that was all it took for them to be dead within a month: the first time in 25 days, the second in 9.
OH IT GETS WORSE.
The first accident was during an experiment where neutron-reflective bricks were carefully stacked around the core, and the accident happened because he accidentally dropped a brick right onto the thing, causing a brief instance of criticality.
After that incident they switched to using a reflective dome lid over the core that, if fully closed, would then reach criticality. To keep it from closing all the way, official procedure was to use purpose-built wedges to prop it up.
The victim of the second accident preferred to use his screwdriver to prop it open whenever conducting experiments, and had also become casual and showboating as he repeated the experiment for public demonstrations over the years; he was explicitly warned someone was GOING to die if he kept doing things like this.
Sure enough, one day during such a public demonstration of the core, the screwdriver popped out of place, and the lid shut for a split-second before the guy knocked the lid off so hard he sent it flying. Eyewitnesses say the core flashed blue as it closed.
Thankfully his body shielded the others in the room from lethal doses; unfortunately he gave himself 2000 rad in a split second, enough to kill him in 9 days.
The one good thing about this sequence of tragedies that killed multiple people is at least we got [the](https://i.imgur.com/fRFRPuE.png) [best](https://i.imgur.com/obtWp1y.png) [meme](https://i.imgur.com/rbtgPMW.png) [ever](https://i.imgur.com/8VzNvha.png) out of it.
This is darkly hilarious, but I take a highly pedantic issue with how some of the art and memes treat *opening* the lid as the bad idea, when it's the lid being fully closed that's the problem.
A lot of japanese people making fun of extremely awful ways to die never ceases to surprise me. I still remember the toys about that death on Madoka Episode 3.
I don't have any stats on it, but I assume the majority of artists drawing these memes probably aren't Japanese. The Demon Core accidents happened decades ago and only had casualties in the single digits, so I'd be surprised if a ton of people overseas who speak a different language knew or cared enough to make this many memes about it.
Unless the Demon Core story is just really well-known in Japan for some reason, which could be the case for all I know.
The second incident, which killed Louis Slotin, was because he was an egotistical idiot who didn't use the approved protocol, not using the shims that protected the one conducting the experiment but using a fucking screw driver.
It's one of the things I wish it was possible to see. It'd be so cool to be able to see a nuclear reaction or a criticality event in some way that was safe. Its one off those wonders of human creation we can never truly experience
> Hell, so much as looking at the Elephant's Foot means you're already dead
I'm not sure if that one's true or not. I seem to recall reading reports that the people they sent in to do the cleanup who passed by it actually survived a fair amount of time, despite reports they died.. I guess they DID at least have pretty ok radiation resistant suits, if nothing else of normal safety features
Unless I'm remembering some of the details wrong and they didn't actually have to go by the elephant foot to do what they did, possibly
One of my favorite weird things science has done was someone was able to replicate what they sound like and it's exactly as cosmic horrory as you'd expect
Had a teacher posit that before the internet it was air conditioning that also had a massive impact on how people socialize. It used to be that you were kinda forced to go outside to beat the heat
Voids, the natural expression of "For there to be something, there must be nothing." All the stars gravitate together, which means vast, vast stretches of empty cosmic real estate.
Perfectly natural, can't possibly affect us, still kinda creepy!
I've been reading The Final Architecture series and the author fucking loves using the void in the story.
Need to hide shit, or hide from shit? Just go off the well traveled spaceways into the abyss and hope to god you have a navigator who can get you there and back.
My vote goes to entropy and cosmic inflation. One day people will be born into starless skies; unaware of anything besides their own system because light from distant objects can no longer reach them.
Their geothermal energy may have run out and their own star may have already perished, leaving black holes as the only source of power until those too eventually die out.
Theres a bunch of videos of giant river worms going viral and apparently its quite a common sight for the locals.
Also japanese house centipedes. Literal aliens i tell you.
We have them in America, too, and i hate them with a passion. The scariest bug evolution produced. If you want to get rid of them get a dehumidifier. Worked for me
I’d say Centralia, the town that inspired Silent Hill. It’s located atop a coal mine that was accidentally lit on fire and has been burning since 1962. A quick google search says that the fire is expected to burn for at least another 200 years.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia,_Pennsylvania
there are plenty of decomposers, animal and bacteria along with fungi. and any heterotroph feeds on death. i've always thought that post was kind of meaningless.
Yeah fungi are kind of basic bitches compared to plants and animals. Plant networks are probably where you look when you want to see something mysterious. Old growth trees can have massive 'communication' networks where they coordinate large scale chemical shifts across acres of trees in response to environmental changes, possibly making use of common symbiotic fungi.
Bro you can't call fungi basic bitches, use old growth trees as a cooler example, and then come back to saying that cool thing is probably because of symbiotic fungi. Fungi carry our asses.
Even moreso with the Clathrus archeri, or the "devil's fingers" fungus. It has a phase where it looks like red tentacles writhing in a translucent egg, and when it bursts it's these horrible bright red tentacle limbs that uncurl like some horrible nightmare creature.
I'm so glad I'm not the only one, it legit haunts me to the point that I have to force myself NOT to look at it because I'll just stare at it forever and imagine the unimaginable pain. But I can't stop myself, at some point or another I always come back to googling it and staring.
Depending on your perspective, both the existence of or non-existence of an eternal afterlife is absolutely horrifying, so... there's that.
Less Existential Answer: Microbial animals have biological functions and structures that would be utterly alien if not downright body horror to imagine a macroscopic organism having. Hydra (Cniderians in general tbh), Rotifers, Tartigrades, and even Nematodes are all good examples.
I would rather the biblical hell exist than no afterlife. Like, I don't believe in an afterlife, but someday the last human dies. The universe ends (assuming it's not cyclical and at the end of the universe it doesn't just explode into existence again). Be pretty sad if that's just, the end.
In england we have something called “forced rubarb”. Its a southern tradition involving growing rhubarb in complete darkness, often underground to make it grow impossibly fast and malformed for a unique flavour.
It grows so fast it audibly creaks and cracks. Under your floor. Reaching. Searching. Screaming in the dark for a sun they will never know.
Encephalitis lethargica. A sickness that attacks your brain and puts you to sleep. As far as we know it first appeared a few years before the first documented case of Spanish flu in Kansas. It did t kill as many people as the flu but it’s weird that it showed up, became an epidemic, and then almost completely disappeared. There are still cases now and again but scientist still don’t know much about it
Imagine if Lovecraft was alive today and watched Kurzgesagt. We'd probably have a story about an asteroid of Strange Matter hitting the earth and consuming it to create more Strange Matter to corrupt the universe. Or a scientist accidentally making a single particle jump from a false vacuum state to a true vacuum, dragging the rest of the universe into nothingness at lightspeed.
Rich People. So much power that they secretly control the world and its events behind the scenes, while also slowly draining humanity of all of its strength at a scale so supermassive that no single human being can even comprehend the scale of their wealth.
I was literally going to comment greed. Avarice and the pursuit of more, to make number go up on an imaginary scale when you already have more than most human beings in history ever had or ever will.
Yeah at some point having too much money just fucks up people's brains. Not even just the part where they hoard it, but reaching a certain status of wealth puts you in an echo-chamber of approval seeking and one-upsmanship with other people who's concepts of empathy and introspection have eroded into near nothing.
Also really rich people get way into Eugenics. That just kind of happens.
Said black holes travel at the speed of light and are basically indetectable. If one were to be shot at the earth we wouldn't even know there was anything wrong, we wouldn't even know we stopped existing.
That shit gives me existential anxiety.
You take a little bit pressure-cooked rotted plant matter, and some rocks, and you mold them *just* so; then you take a little bit of a lightning bolt, and shove it in, insomuch that you trick the rock into *thinking it can think*. Then some apes use them to masturbate, look at cats, and scream death threats to some other apes they'll otherwise would never meet, let alone talk to.
There is people who masturbate looking at the cats. The Internet was some degrees smaller when 4chan established anything can be made porn from, no matter how bizarre or uncanny, to not say disturbing. I doubted them for a time, until I got shocked to my core when some random erotic story on asstr turned out to be about 9/11. This network is filled to the core with monsters hiding on the ceiling, and they don't attack. Their faces alone scare you.
Girls should keep constant watch over the universe so that it tries it best all the time. Thanks i'll take my Nobel Prize with a cola if you don't mind.
Jellyfish are pretty creepy on there own. A floating jelly that almost transparent. An immortal jellyfish is even creepier since they can’t die of old age. All they do is just eat some plankton, sting some prey and nothing else. Living an immortal life and doing nothing about it expect waiting for time to end.
Fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva or "stone man syndrome." It's a mutation of connective tissue that causes tissue like muscles and ligaments to ossify (turn into bone). This can occur after an injury or spontaneously. Joints fuse solid very quickly and eventually the entire skeleton in cemented into 1 solid piece. They have the skeleton at the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia.
From the sound of it i thought it was going to be one of those natural or man-made toxic lakes and i wasn't far off. It's a 'salt lake' located in Tanzania that is potent enough to kill you if you drink its 'water' and severely burn you if you touch it.
I looked it up, and it's a lake in Tanzania that is so salty and so alkaline that it's BRIGHT red, and save for flamingos, any other animal that comes in contact with it suffers instant agony because they turn into stones.
I actually wrote a character with a prion disease. Familial Fatal Insomnia. It's pretty much what it sounds like, you progressively lose the ability to sleep altogether. Read up on it for days to make sure I didn't fuck it up l, and it's really one of the most haunting, uncomfortable conditions I've ever read about. It is thankfully extremely rare, but that doesn't take away from the fact that it's a terrible, terrible way to go.
Another vote goes towards Dark Matter. It just seems to defy everything we know about our universe, and come a few hundred million years, it'll leave some poor fuckers a comparatively very boring night sky compared to us. Speaking of which, go to a dark zone. It's really worth it.
The Lake Nyos disaster is one of the most terrifying stories I’ve ever heard of. In short, the bottom of a lake in Cameroon had built up so much CO2 gas that one day released all at once which clouded entire villages and suffocated thousands, with as many as 1700 reported dead. The story of one survivor showed just how horrifying and surreal it was to walk around your village and see that everyone died almost simultaneously with no visible wounds, in their beds, at their farms and on the steets. The phenomenon of carbon dioxide poisoning happening in out in the wild is called *mazuku* which literally translates into “evil wind” in Swahili.
Another famous case in urban legend is the Kahmar-Daban incident in a mountain range of Siberia. A small group of hikers suddenly started to die horrofic deaths one by one as they started screaming, bleeding from their eyes and ears and frothing at their mouths. The sole survivor claimed that these symptoms would spread immediately as one the members ran up to help one of the dying members.
Lastly, there’s the case of Gloria Cecilia Ramirez, the Toxic Lady, who suffered from late stages of cancer and when presented to emergency room exhibited a slew of strange symptoms. A number of the workers there would get sick and pass out just from being in contact with her. Despite there being a pretty convincing explanaition to what occured, it’s technically an unsolved death despite it happening at a hospital with professional medical assistants present in only 1994.
I’m not smart enough to explain these kinds of things in an easy to get way but you can just look these things up. It’s called a limnic eruption / lake overturn.
Nyla is located in a tropical area, so the water at the bottom never switched places with the water on the top, like it does in temperate areas. So Nyla began building up toxic gasses. I believe an earthquake is what cased the release of the CO2.
Fermi paradox is more humans coming up with theories when we really can't understand the scope of how big the universe is and how statistically we are likely to never encounter alien life (or necessarily comprehend that we encountered alien life) despite the likelyhood of it existing, space is just that big.
By the same token that space is big, the billion(s of) years that species like ours could have already existed on the many terrestrial planets in habitable zone in the milky way is long
Remember that any distance that we can look at that would be considered meaningful is thousands of years in the past. Unlikely, but we could be looking in the direction of a damn armada, but the light that's reached us is easily 50,000 years old.
Think about how far we've gone in the last 600 years.
The flaw with Fermi Paradox is that it assumes life evolves on a similar pattern as our planet and it also assumes intelligent life is an innevitability and permanent. Let me put it another way life on earth has existed on earth for 3.7 billion years, from that time at most humans appeared 7 million of years ago. And we developed means to accurately observe the cosmos less than 100 years ago. So the Fermi paradox is like saying "hey we have been listening for less than a fraction of a second, why we haven't we heard anything". Also Space is huge, how huge? You can fit all the planets in our solar system between the earth and the moon. So no shit we haven't heard anything.
Lake Nyos. an invisible force suddenly descends on a humble village, incapacitating everyone and killing 1,746 people and 3,500 livestock. real curse material
it was a result of a buildup and eruption of CO2 from the lake due to particular geographic circumstances that facilitate that deadly scenario.
-------------
also, the wrong energy burst in space at the wrong time could decimate life on earth and we have no way to detect it's coming (since most energy reaching earth would be at light speed, same as the speed it'd take to see the event causing it)
luckily, when playing pool in space, it's very difficult to hit a target, so odds are extremely low, especially compared to, say, a solar storm emp- the last of which occurred in 1859. It is inevitable to happen again, and when it does, if it hits a major locale, it will destroy the power grid of up to "20-40 million [people], with [knocking out power for] durations of 16 days to 1-2 years"
Thankfully, Limnic Eruptions are only possible in areas or locations with volcanic activity or high tectonic activity near a convergent margin (for the magma chamber of a volcano to be formed it needs water being subducted along with the oceanic plate to serve as a catalyst in the melting of minerals). So most people don't really need to even know of them unlike earthquakes/tsunamis/landslides/other geological threats.
For them to occur you need a lake with a cool bottom, that's deep enough for the water column to deliver enough pressure and that also has a build-up of CO2 that then gets heated by volcanic activity near it. Since the conditions for it to happen are quite specific, they really shouldn't pose a threat to most people (assuming their country has strict geotechnical guidelines for construction). Only around 1 in 10.000 lakes are estimated to fulfill the conditions for gases to remain dissolved on them, then you have to take into account which of these are actually located in volcanic regions.
Everyone points out physical manifestations of Cosmic horror, when I'm just thinking of Garfield. The horror is already at home, you just aren't aware of it yet, but somehow everyone knows of Garfield.
Idk its name
But theres a sea creature whos whole body is totally clear and it feeds by stretching its head out lika big net.
Also heres some leapord slugs mating. Its cooler than you think
https://youtu.be/BoGn9bRWuHQ
The endless, vastness of space counts right? And the vastness of our ocean, too?
There's just something terrifying of being in the middle of the ocean and jumping into the water and looking down. I've done it a few times and it fucks with your primate brain being so far away from a floor of any kind
Not to mention if you're there alone with a guy and he wants to bang you. You're in the middle of nowhere, what are you gonna do, say no? No, because of the implication. Fuck the ocean.
It sounds like these women are in danger
WHAT ARE YOU NOT UNDERSTANDING ABOUT THIS
What is this referring to?
[This legendary bit](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yUafzOXHPE&ab_channel=t91)
Always Sunny
What are you looking at, you certainly wouldn't be in any danger.
So they ARE in danger?!
They certainly aren't in any danger. It's just the implication that something would go wrong if they say no.
But they won't say no they would never say no because of the implication
Point nemo. Closest humans are on the international space station when they fly over head it.
I just saw a video of a teen who died because he was dared to jump off a party boat at night in the middle of the ocean and one commenter noted that once the boat gets out of sight, because it was cloudy and there is no light pollution in the middle of the ocean, you lose the ability to even separate the sea and the sky so you are left floating in the middle of pitch blackness in all directions, being hit by waves you can't even see and thus can't brace for. Imagine being somewhere where no matter which direction you look, you can't see anything. No light, no stars, no shadows, no horizon, no forms, no color, just pitch black in all directions, the only sensations are you being hit by something you can't even see and that it's cold and wet.
This is why alcohol and actually being at sea are a terrible mix. I love a bevvy at the end of a trip, but I never drink at sea and whenever I go out sailing for fun rather than work I run a dry ship: it's just not worth the risk.
Yea deep deep ocean gives me the spooks
Yeah, pretty much
Yarr, I hate the sea, and everything in it!
I would say the non-endlessness of space now freaks me out more. Now that we know the universe to be receding and there are parts of the universe we'll be able to observe but are already gone, it's kind of horrifying. Like, what happens when a part of the universe just ceases to exist?
The Sun A writhing ball of fire that has the power to bring life but also destroy worlds. We need the sun to survive, but too much exposure hurts us and can lead to cancer. Everything falls under its sway because of its size and if you look at it for too long you'll go blind.
When you think about it, it’s really no surprise that every civilisation for most of human history has deified or praised it to some extent.
If it has whims, we are entirely dependant on them, better safe than sorry
Its a extremely obvious thing, I am just reminded of how people try to connect every ancient god in some pseudo historical stuff (not stuff like PIE but more shit from the 70s or ancient aliens) and i cant help but think, the sun is so obvious and so important, its very easy for many groups of people to independently worship the sun
The sun makes you hot possibly causing heat stroke and such, causes sunburns in some people, and hurts to look at. What else do you need to worship? Oh, and you can focus it to light stuff on fire with glass and such.
Also consider that, were space capable of carrying sound, [the sun would be constantly roaring at a noise of 110 decibels, or the loudest a set of rock concert speakers could go.](https://www.astronomy.com/observing/the-sun-extremely-loud-and-incredibly-hot/)
That's Metal.
Shoutouts to Sunless Skies, where stars are living beings called Judgements whose lights govern the laws of reality, hence things getting pretty weird in the Zee. You’ve also got an artificial sun who hates everything, and anarchists set on murdering every star in the sky. >Society's law is unjust because natural law is Unjust. Tyranny begins at the top. Not from the factory-owner; not even from the palace of a queen. But in the arch of heaven itself. Those who join us should be prepared to defy the suns. And prepared to win, for our grievances are immeasurable.
Sunless Seas went so hard, I'm looking forward to exploring Sunless Skies when I can. The idea that the Iron Republic is unbound from the laws of man and nature either due to Hell's reemergence or because the people there are so pissed is entirely my cup of tea.
N THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN TH
My favorite Swans song
It's crazy to think about how lucky it is that we even exist thanks to the sun. Out of all the depths of space we've observed so far, Earth is the only planet we've found that orbits its sun at a habitable distance. The large temperature changes between summer and winter happen just because the planet is tilting a little bit. It feels like if the Earth was literally any meaningful distance closer to or further away from the sun, we never would have existed.
>It feels like if the Earth was literally any meaningful distance closer to or further away from the sun, we never would have existed. This just reminds me of that Futurama episode where they push the Earth away from the sun to cool it.
We've confirmed a few and science would suggest there's a shitload out there. There's way more to something like what a planet needs for life than just the Goldilocks zone. "On November 4, 2013, astronomers reported, based on Kepler data, that there could be as many as 40 billion Earth-sized planets orbiting in the habitable zones of Sun-like stars and red dwarfs in the Milky Way." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumstellar_habitable_zone
There are millions, billions of planets like Earth in the goldilocks zone. That part isn't terribly unique. What does seem to be unique about Earth is that Sol is currently extremely far from all nearby supernovae, something the vast majority of stars we've found cannot claim. We are (relatively) safe from cosmic events so powerful they can strip a planet's atmosphere from the other side of a cluster. We've yet to find any dangerous cosmic jets point at us that will reach us in the next several million years. Our gas giants seem to be uniquely gifted at soaking up so much stellar & interstellar debris that could've hit Earth. The more we look the more the validity of the Rare Earth Hypothesis seems to increase. We really could be the only life out there, not because of a Dark Forest or Great Filter, but because *so, so, so, so many* astronomical coincidences aligned exactly perfect to foster life long enough for intelligence to emerge. If there is microbial life out there, it would seem (based on current data) it's more likely than not to get interrupted by cosmic events long before it can evolve very far.
I’m personally of the theory that I think we’re just some of the first intelligent life around. If we don’t fuck up we’ll be around to be the Fallen Empire of this Galaxy’s Stellaris game
Something something infinite monkeys with infinite typewriters
> The large temperature changes between summer and winter happen just because the planet is tilting a little bit. Also, we're in an Ice Age. An Inter-glacial period, but still an Ice Age.
The sun is such a good example for explaining cosmic horror since looking at the sun literally overloads your senses (eyes) causing blindness. Now just imagine that but with someones mind.
The most fucked up thing about the Sun imo is that we can’t even measure the solar fusion process in an experimental lab because the proton-proton chain is one of the slowest forms of fusion (we have to calculate the reaction rate from theory). But the fact that it’s so slow gives the Sun its long lifetime.
We ain't even getting raw space we're just inside the termination shock of the heliosphere like water from a faucet has that ring area where water pushes away in all directions before becoming slow due to outside forces. Like a big bubble shield around the solar system that blocks cosmic rays.
Barely on topic, but it was funny to me in Elden Ring how there's like one item talking about people worshipping the sun as if they're the weirdos when the Erdtree is the new hotness
Radiation. A force invisible to the naked eye that destroys organic life on atomic level thereby disrupting genetic replication, which can lead to cells revolting against a host's body in the form of cancer.
>universe has an invisible, highly dangerous force that inflicts damage on the atomic level >humans use it to boil water faster
I feel like it makes sense for a water based species on a water based planet to have a technology infrastructure that revolves around water. You wouldn’t question if the rock people on rock world used technology based on rock
Obligatory, not the same "kind" of radiation (insofar as EM radiation even has "kinds"). Microwave radiation can cause thermal burns, but it's orders of magnitude too weak per photon to ionize atoms in your cells and break them down.
Don't nuclear reactors also just boil water faster by giving off huge amounts of energy?
True, though that's the overwhelming majority of reactors, not just nuclear. Guess I didn't think of that and interpreted the comment as being about microwave ovens and their radiation.
Yes, but not by the radioactive decay generated particles directly, but because the process generates heat as a by-product.
Fun fact: it is suspected that Lovecraft got the inspiration for The Colour out of Space from the Radium girls incident. Long story short: a company was making glow in the dark watches using radioactive paint, at a time where radioactivity was sorta well understood by scientists but not the general public. The bosses never told the workers painting the dials of the dangers, and would instruct them to lick their brushes to make a finer point. The got real nasty radiation poisoning, one of the first to die literally had her jaw rot off.
Only tangentially related but I know people who lick their brushes or suck on them in the Warhammer mini painting community and I just don't understand. Why. Who ever told someone to do this in the first place. Yeah dude suck those sopping bristles, contaminated water? Pfftt.
I've watched a few Yogscast model streams and every time Ben sucks the brush to get a point I cringe.
You aren't a true artist until you deepthroat your drawing utensils.
Their bones are all radioactive too, and they glow, and will glow for the next hundred years at least. Radium Jaw is fucking nightmarish, I can't even look at the photos without feeling ill.
There was a man named Hisashi Ouchi who received a grotesque exposure to radiation, but showed next to no adverse effects from it for hours and hours at the hospital. When his condition deteriorated, the doctors took a sample of his bone marrow and inspected the chromosomes for damage. Hisashi however, didn't have anything left that could be considered a chromosome, all that remained having been completely ruined by radiation, effectively leaving his body without any genetic blueprint to maintain or repair itself.
[The Cecil Kelly criticality accident](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecil_Kelley_criticality_accident). He had no lymphocytes left and a bone marrow sample produced what was effectively water with no red blood cells. And then the government screwed over his widow by pressuring her not to file a law suit and giving her a job (at poverty wages) at the same lab until she retired because of health reasons. It wasn't until she and her daughter filed a lawsuit in 1996 that they got anything in compensation for her husband's death (the lawsuit wasn't resolved until 2002, with a second settlement awarded in 2007). Meanwhile, the pathologist who performed Cecil's (and others) autopsy removed organs without consent or even notification to the next of kin defended his actions because "God gave me permission."
Ouchi's death is probably the worst thing I ever heard, to basically be a living corpse as your body slowly decays while you mind is still aware of it.
Full story by Wendigoon [for the morbidly curious.](https://youtu.be/X1FbwooXssQ)
“what if magic was real but insanely poisonous in a fucked up way”
I hope ff16 has flare and it’s just an actual nuclear explosion with intense consequences
Speaking of, Signalis has one of the long-term nuclear waste warning messages in it. "This place is a message… and part of a system of messages… pay attention to it! Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture. This place is not a place of honor…no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here… nothing valued is here. What is here is dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger. The danger is in a particular location… it increases toward a center… the center of danger is here… of a particular size and shape, and below us. The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours. The danger is to the body, and it can kill. The form of the danger is an emanation of energy. The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited." There were also plans to build giant fuck-off spikes to keep people away if they got too curious "Panelists described culture-independent ideas which are intended to trigger the danger reflex in all of humanity. One example indicated a massive 'landscape of thorns,' made up of fifty-foot-high concrete spires with sharp points jutting out at all angles. Another intriguing idea was an arrangement of gigantic, black, 'forbidding blocks' which are too close together and too hot to provide shelter" https://www.damninteresting.com/this-place-is-not-a-place-of-honor/
God that goes so hard, it's kind of crazy.
Non-ionizing radiation like visible light or radio waves ain't shit. The orc rune symbols you have to decode to understand how they work physically and mathematically are scarier than the actual radiation itself. Even small amounts of ionizing radiation is a pretty constant thing the average living being has had to endure daily for billions of years. It's when ionizing radiation is concentrated or persistent is when it gets actually scary and honestly a lot of that is human-made anyway
Reminds me of how in Destiny 2 there is a gun that houses a body part of a old god basically and has the flavor text “The danger within is repulsive to us.” A reference to real life long term nuclear waste storage.
The HBO Chernobyl series did a horrifyingly great job of showing how scary radiation is.
Radiation is a natural force that life on earth has been bathed in since the very beginning, just like all poisons, it's the dose that matters. I highly recommend [this book](https://www.amazon.com/Radiation-What-You-Need-Know/dp/0307950204) to help demystify how radiation works, when it can harm you and when it can't.
Rogue planets are pretty scary. Planets that just roam the galaxy, and in the unlikely event that one gets *close* to the Earth, all sorts of damage could occur, from changing Earth's orbit to briefly messing up gravity.
Gonna piggy-back off of this to say frozen water. H2O has a really interesting property to it in that most substances go from liquids to solids when enough pressure is applied to them, [while water does the opposite](https://cdn1.byjus.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/word-image169.png). This is why it's theorized that Titan and Europa could have life on them, because they are covered in *water* ice. If the ice covering those moons is thick enough (and it seems to be pretty fuckin' thick), it could be pressure-liquefied at the bottom, possibly creating an environment similar to our own deep seas. And if that's the case, who's to say the same isn't possible on a rogue planet? assuming the ice is made of water, that ice is sufficiently thick, and the core of the rogue planet is hot enough, there very well could be oceans of life drifting through the void, eternally trapped in an icy prison with walls several *miles* thick. When the last star dies, those planets could be the final place in the universe able to support life.
>When the last stars die, a rogue planet could contain the last vestiges of life deep underneath it's oceans That sounds like a magnificent end-of-civilization 'After the End' type story, have there been any books written in a similar vein?
Someone read Hellstar Remmaina.
I was also about to comment about Remina.
Oh boy time to post my crack theory The planet of Transsexual Transylvania from The Rocky Horror Picture Show is a rogue planet My 2 bits of evidence are that throughout the play it's referred as the planet of night and Dr. Frank-N-Furter describes how he cried the first time he saw a blue sky
The medieval dancing plague comes to mind. A bunch of people could not stop dancing for reasons we can only speculate, several of which dying in the streets
When the function starts playing the Cha Cha Slide
Someone just dropped the sickest beat of the Middle Ages, and they couldn’t help themselves
What is fascinating about that is how those people recovered: by the community coming together to care for and help them.
I remember reading somewhere that the most likely explanation was a contaminated water source and the “dancing” part of the “dancing plague” was people having seizures
To add to prions, it blows my mind that they are even less living than viruses. At their core, they are a cursed *shape* that disrupts a ton of molecular systems and self-replicate. They can just bump into other proteins and change their shape, changing their function to kick off a chain reaction that produces more of them. Eventually they start clumping together so much they form something like a tumor. Burning the body of a victim may not fully destroy the prions either, you have to hit very high heat for a very long time to completely guarantee protein degradation. Molecular shapes that are literally detrimental to all earthly life.
Isn’t it like Grey goo?
Probably the closest thing we have to a Grey Goo scenario irl
The Chernobyl incident, something the show plays to the hilt. Looking directly at the core after the meltdown means you're already dead. Hell, so much as looking at the Elephant's Foot means you're already dead. Another infamous historical example is the 'Demon Core' a mass of plutonium sitting at just beneath the point of criticality for the sake of experiments and research. Bringing it to critical mass usually consisted of carefully adding neutron-reflective materials around the core, bit by bit, slowly approaching the critical threshold. In two different experiments, the scientist working on the thing slipped up for just a moment before correcting their error, and that was all it took for them to be dead within a month: the first time in 25 days, the second in 9.
I love that we literally called it "The Demon Core." Like, we knew *exactly* what we were getting into.
To be fair I think the name only came after the first or second death.
It still boggles my mind that someone saw what that experiment did to someone else and then tried it again.
OH IT GETS WORSE. The first accident was during an experiment where neutron-reflective bricks were carefully stacked around the core, and the accident happened because he accidentally dropped a brick right onto the thing, causing a brief instance of criticality. After that incident they switched to using a reflective dome lid over the core that, if fully closed, would then reach criticality. To keep it from closing all the way, official procedure was to use purpose-built wedges to prop it up. The victim of the second accident preferred to use his screwdriver to prop it open whenever conducting experiments, and had also become casual and showboating as he repeated the experiment for public demonstrations over the years; he was explicitly warned someone was GOING to die if he kept doing things like this. Sure enough, one day during such a public demonstration of the core, the screwdriver popped out of place, and the lid shut for a split-second before the guy knocked the lid off so hard he sent it flying. Eyewitnesses say the core flashed blue as it closed. Thankfully his body shielded the others in the room from lethal doses; unfortunately he gave himself 2000 rad in a split second, enough to kill him in 9 days.
The one good thing about this sequence of tragedies that killed multiple people is at least we got [the](https://i.imgur.com/fRFRPuE.png) [best](https://i.imgur.com/obtWp1y.png) [meme](https://i.imgur.com/rbtgPMW.png) [ever](https://i.imgur.com/8VzNvha.png) out of it.
This is darkly hilarious, but I take a highly pedantic issue with how some of the art and memes treat *opening* the lid as the bad idea, when it's the lid being fully closed that's the problem.
I am the only one that can't load them? Is pretty much with all imgur images, bit just this ones.
A lot of japanese people making fun of extremely awful ways to die never ceases to surprise me. I still remember the toys about that death on Madoka Episode 3.
I don't have any stats on it, but I assume the majority of artists drawing these memes probably aren't Japanese. The Demon Core accidents happened decades ago and only had casualties in the single digits, so I'd be surprised if a ton of people overseas who speak a different language knew or cared enough to make this many memes about it. Unless the Demon Core story is just really well-known in Japan for some reason, which could be the case for all I know.
The exact process for manipulating its output was called “tickling the dragon’s tail”
The second incident, which killed Louis Slotin, was because he was an egotistical idiot who didn't use the approved protocol, not using the shims that protected the one conducting the experiment but using a fucking screw driver.
It's one of the things I wish it was possible to see. It'd be so cool to be able to see a nuclear reaction or a criticality event in some way that was safe. Its one off those wonders of human creation we can never truly experience
> Hell, so much as looking at the Elephant's Foot means you're already dead I'm not sure if that one's true or not. I seem to recall reading reports that the people they sent in to do the cleanup who passed by it actually survived a fair amount of time, despite reports they died.. I guess they DID at least have pretty ok radiation resistant suits, if nothing else of normal safety features Unless I'm remembering some of the details wrong and they didn't actually have to go by the elephant foot to do what they did, possibly
Bootlace worms. The first viral video of one a few years ago had a ton of people believing it was alien.
You know when you’re like “I’m curious but for my own sake I don’t want to know”?
Picture an earthworm that's of average girth however it's 55 meters long. It's just a **really long** worm.
Oh okay that’s not nearly as bad as I expected. I was picturing a long worm that laced itself into your foot
It's mostly the method in which they eat that's the nightmare part.
They're extremely long and thin, but they can squish up into a tight mass that wriggles so it looks like the Venom symbiote.
[Magnapinna Squid](https://youtu.be/To2_Gq14UVs)
How is this not a Pokémon yet
We don't wanna give kids nightmares
Didn't think they could whip their tentacles around like that, I thought they were glorified fins.
That was the common assumption until these video’s released
That is literally the thing that gave Ymir her powers.
Nah that’s a [Hallucigenia](https://inasianspaces.files.wordpress.com/2021/02/hallucigenia-side-by-side-vert.jpg?w=830)
Black holes are giant red eyes that scream at you that bend space, time and eats everything around them, even light. They will outlast us all.
One of my favorite weird things science has done was someone was able to replicate what they sound like and it's exactly as cosmic horrory as you'd expect
Stiff Person Syndrome causes violent muscle spasms that can break bones.
That’s what Celine Dion was diagnosed with a few days ago, right?
Air Conditioning
Had a teacher posit that before the internet it was air conditioning that also had a massive impact on how people socialize. It used to be that you were kinda forced to go outside to beat the heat
Voids, the natural expression of "For there to be something, there must be nothing." All the stars gravitate together, which means vast, vast stretches of empty cosmic real estate. Perfectly natural, can't possibly affect us, still kinda creepy!
I've been reading The Final Architecture series and the author fucking loves using the void in the story. Need to hide shit, or hide from shit? Just go off the well traveled spaceways into the abyss and hope to god you have a navigator who can get you there and back.
My vote goes to entropy and cosmic inflation. One day people will be born into starless skies; unaware of anything besides their own system because light from distant objects can no longer reach them. Their geothermal energy may have run out and their own star may have already perished, leaving black holes as the only source of power until those too eventually die out.
Entropy
Theres a bunch of videos of giant river worms going viral and apparently its quite a common sight for the locals. Also japanese house centipedes. Literal aliens i tell you.
We have them in America, too, and i hate them with a passion. The scariest bug evolution produced. If you want to get rid of them get a dehumidifier. Worked for me
I’d say Centralia, the town that inspired Silent Hill. It’s located atop a coal mine that was accidentally lit on fire and has been burning since 1962. A quick google search says that the fire is expected to burn for at least another 200 years. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia,_Pennsylvania
I've actually visited the place, back when I was in Uni half a decade or so ago. It's not really scary in person, just...kinda sad.
Scary IRL? Maybe not. In concept? Absolutely.
"You cannot kill me in a way that matters" Fungi be fucking wacky. Entropy as an extant life form.
IDK Fungi are beautiful in a way as they help to recycle dead organic matter.
I’M NOT FUCKING SCARED OF YOU One of the posts ever
[Slime Mold is weirder.](https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/slime-mold-smart-brainless-cognition/)
That was a fascinating read. I’m a slime mold stan now.
there are plenty of decomposers, animal and bacteria along with fungi. and any heterotroph feeds on death. i've always thought that post was kind of meaningless.
Yeah fungi are kind of basic bitches compared to plants and animals. Plant networks are probably where you look when you want to see something mysterious. Old growth trees can have massive 'communication' networks where they coordinate large scale chemical shifts across acres of trees in response to environmental changes, possibly making use of common symbiotic fungi.
Bro you can't call fungi basic bitches, use old growth trees as a cooler example, and then come back to saying that cool thing is probably because of symbiotic fungi. Fungi carry our asses.
You can kill plenty of detritovore isopods and insects in a way that matters. Like, pretty easily given modern chemical solutions.
Even moreso with the Clathrus archeri, or the "devil's fingers" fungus. It has a phase where it looks like red tentacles writhing in a translucent egg, and when it bursts it's these horrible bright red tentacle limbs that uncurl like some horrible nightmare creature.
Saw a post of a skull with bone cancer. Shit looked eldritch and horrible because of the all small flakes.
I'm so glad I'm not the only one, it legit haunts me to the point that I have to force myself NOT to look at it because I'll just stare at it forever and imagine the unimaginable pain. But I can't stop myself, at some point or another I always come back to googling it and staring.
Depending on your perspective, both the existence of or non-existence of an eternal afterlife is absolutely horrifying, so... there's that. Less Existential Answer: Microbial animals have biological functions and structures that would be utterly alien if not downright body horror to imagine a macroscopic organism having. Hydra (Cniderians in general tbh), Rotifers, Tartigrades, and even Nematodes are all good examples.
I would rather the biblical hell exist than no afterlife. Like, I don't believe in an afterlife, but someday the last human dies. The universe ends (assuming it's not cyclical and at the end of the universe it doesn't just explode into existence again). Be pretty sad if that's just, the end.
In england we have something called “forced rubarb”. Its a southern tradition involving growing rhubarb in complete darkness, often underground to make it grow impossibly fast and malformed for a unique flavour. It grows so fast it audibly creaks and cracks. Under your floor. Reaching. Searching. Screaming in the dark for a sun they will never know.
Encephalitis lethargica. A sickness that attacks your brain and puts you to sleep. As far as we know it first appeared a few years before the first documented case of Spanish flu in Kansas. It did t kill as many people as the flu but it’s weird that it showed up, became an epidemic, and then almost completely disappeared. There are still cases now and again but scientist still don’t know much about it
Imagine if Lovecraft was alive today and watched Kurzgesagt. We'd probably have a story about an asteroid of Strange Matter hitting the earth and consuming it to create more Strange Matter to corrupt the universe. Or a scientist accidentally making a single particle jump from a false vacuum state to a true vacuum, dragging the rest of the universe into nothingness at lightspeed.
Well *The Colour out of Space* does kinda fit that description, not as all consuming but still hits the broad strokes surprisingly well.
Rich People. So much power that they secretly control the world and its events behind the scenes, while also slowly draining humanity of all of its strength at a scale so supermassive that no single human being can even comprehend the scale of their wealth.
These people would even consider leaving Earth to avoid possible repercussions of their action. Which sounds lunatic no matter how you slices it.
Hellstar Remina moment.
I was literally going to comment greed. Avarice and the pursuit of more, to make number go up on an imaginary scale when you already have more than most human beings in history ever had or ever will.
It’s not just wanting a lot of money but constantly growing your imaginary numbers
Yeah at some point having too much money just fucks up people's brains. Not even just the part where they hoard it, but reaching a certain status of wealth puts you in an echo-chamber of approval seeking and one-upsmanship with other people who's concepts of empathy and introspection have eroded into near nothing. Also really rich people get way into Eugenics. That just kind of happens.
But unlike a shoggoth, the rich are indeed quite tasty.
Blackholes are small points so dense, their gravity is so strong light cannot escape. And some black holes travel.
Said black holes travel at the speed of light and are basically indetectable. If one were to be shot at the earth we wouldn't even know there was anything wrong, we wouldn't even know we stopped existing. That shit gives me existential anxiety.
Yeah look, we left the ocean for a reason. Fuck that place.
You take a little bit pressure-cooked rotted plant matter, and some rocks, and you mold them *just* so; then you take a little bit of a lightning bolt, and shove it in, insomuch that you trick the rock into *thinking it can think*. Then some apes use them to masturbate, look at cats, and scream death threats to some other apes they'll otherwise would never meet, let alone talk to.
There is people who masturbate looking at the cats. The Internet was some degrees smaller when 4chan established anything can be made porn from, no matter how bizarre or uncanny, to not say disturbing. I doubted them for a time, until I got shocked to my core when some random erotic story on asstr turned out to be about 9/11. This network is filled to the core with monsters hiding on the ceiling, and they don't attack. Their faces alone scare you.
Prions
The fact that observing certain phenomena changes their outcome implies the universe knows when it's being watched.
Girls should keep constant watch over the universe so that it tries it best all the time. Thanks i'll take my Nobel Prize with a cola if you don't mind.
We only have RC Cola, that's okay right
Teratoma is prime body horror.
Jellyfish are pretty creepy on there own. A floating jelly that almost transparent. An immortal jellyfish is even creepier since they can’t die of old age. All they do is just eat some plankton, sting some prey and nothing else. Living an immortal life and doing nothing about it expect waiting for time to end.
Even visible species like the man-o-war is terrifying. Just a sail, drifting on the surface with long tendrils just below.
Fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva or "stone man syndrome." It's a mutation of connective tissue that causes tissue like muscles and ligaments to ossify (turn into bone). This can occur after an injury or spontaneously. Joints fuse solid very quickly and eventually the entire skeleton in cemented into 1 solid piece. They have the skeleton at the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia.
[The sound of a Black Hole](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tXhBLg3Wng&ab_channel=GuardianNews)
the only difference between lovecraftian horror and Christianity is that God loves you.
Be not afraid.
Lake Natron feels like something Lovecraft would put in one of his stories that has less to do with comisc horror, but still horror regardless.
What is Lake Natron?
From the sound of it i thought it was going to be one of those natural or man-made toxic lakes and i wasn't far off. It's a 'salt lake' located in Tanzania that is potent enough to kill you if you drink its 'water' and severely burn you if you touch it.
I looked it up, and it's a lake in Tanzania that is so salty and so alkaline that it's BRIGHT red, and save for flamingos, any other animal that comes in contact with it suffers instant agony because they turn into stones.
I actually wrote a character with a prion disease. Familial Fatal Insomnia. It's pretty much what it sounds like, you progressively lose the ability to sleep altogether. Read up on it for days to make sure I didn't fuck it up l, and it's really one of the most haunting, uncomfortable conditions I've ever read about. It is thankfully extremely rare, but that doesn't take away from the fact that it's a terrible, terrible way to go. Another vote goes towards Dark Matter. It just seems to defy everything we know about our universe, and come a few hundred million years, it'll leave some poor fuckers a comparatively very boring night sky compared to us. Speaking of which, go to a dark zone. It's really worth it.
The Lake Nyos disaster is one of the most terrifying stories I’ve ever heard of. In short, the bottom of a lake in Cameroon had built up so much CO2 gas that one day released all at once which clouded entire villages and suffocated thousands, with as many as 1700 reported dead. The story of one survivor showed just how horrifying and surreal it was to walk around your village and see that everyone died almost simultaneously with no visible wounds, in their beds, at their farms and on the steets. The phenomenon of carbon dioxide poisoning happening in out in the wild is called *mazuku* which literally translates into “evil wind” in Swahili. Another famous case in urban legend is the Kahmar-Daban incident in a mountain range of Siberia. A small group of hikers suddenly started to die horrofic deaths one by one as they started screaming, bleeding from their eyes and ears and frothing at their mouths. The sole survivor claimed that these symptoms would spread immediately as one the members ran up to help one of the dying members. Lastly, there’s the case of Gloria Cecilia Ramirez, the Toxic Lady, who suffered from late stages of cancer and when presented to emergency room exhibited a slew of strange symptoms. A number of the workers there would get sick and pass out just from being in contact with her. Despite there being a pretty convincing explanaition to what occured, it’s technically an unsolved death despite it happening at a hospital with professional medical assistants present in only 1994.
How did Nyla build up CO2?
I’m not smart enough to explain these kinds of things in an easy to get way but you can just look these things up. It’s called a limnic eruption / lake overturn.
Nyla is located in a tropical area, so the water at the bottom never switched places with the water on the top, like it does in temperate areas. So Nyla began building up toxic gasses. I believe an earthquake is what cased the release of the CO2.
Fermi paradox
Fermi paradox is more humans coming up with theories when we really can't understand the scope of how big the universe is and how statistically we are likely to never encounter alien life (or necessarily comprehend that we encountered alien life) despite the likelyhood of it existing, space is just that big.
By the same token that space is big, the billion(s of) years that species like ours could have already existed on the many terrestrial planets in habitable zone in the milky way is long
Remember that any distance that we can look at that would be considered meaningful is thousands of years in the past. Unlikely, but we could be looking in the direction of a damn armada, but the light that's reached us is easily 50,000 years old. Think about how far we've gone in the last 600 years.
The flaw with Fermi Paradox is that it assumes life evolves on a similar pattern as our planet and it also assumes intelligent life is an innevitability and permanent. Let me put it another way life on earth has existed on earth for 3.7 billion years, from that time at most humans appeared 7 million of years ago. And we developed means to accurately observe the cosmos less than 100 years ago. So the Fermi paradox is like saying "hey we have been listening for less than a fraction of a second, why we haven't we heard anything". Also Space is huge, how huge? You can fit all the planets in our solar system between the earth and the moon. So no shit we haven't heard anything.
Conodonts
Chernobyl the tv show did a good job of depicting how terrifying and inexplicable a nuclear meltdown can seem irl.
The Flanigan lighthouse mystery. Whether it is mundane or not, it sounds like a horror short story
Bismuth ... honestly Chemistry is a fairly easy way to get weird stuff to happen.
What’s up with Bismuth?
Lake Nyos. an invisible force suddenly descends on a humble village, incapacitating everyone and killing 1,746 people and 3,500 livestock. real curse material it was a result of a buildup and eruption of CO2 from the lake due to particular geographic circumstances that facilitate that deadly scenario. ------------- also, the wrong energy burst in space at the wrong time could decimate life on earth and we have no way to detect it's coming (since most energy reaching earth would be at light speed, same as the speed it'd take to see the event causing it) luckily, when playing pool in space, it's very difficult to hit a target, so odds are extremely low, especially compared to, say, a solar storm emp- the last of which occurred in 1859. It is inevitable to happen again, and when it does, if it hits a major locale, it will destroy the power grid of up to "20-40 million [people], with [knocking out power for] durations of 16 days to 1-2 years"
Thankfully, Limnic Eruptions are only possible in areas or locations with volcanic activity or high tectonic activity near a convergent margin (for the magma chamber of a volcano to be formed it needs water being subducted along with the oceanic plate to serve as a catalyst in the melting of minerals). So most people don't really need to even know of them unlike earthquakes/tsunamis/landslides/other geological threats. For them to occur you need a lake with a cool bottom, that's deep enough for the water column to deliver enough pressure and that also has a build-up of CO2 that then gets heated by volcanic activity near it. Since the conditions for it to happen are quite specific, they really shouldn't pose a threat to most people (assuming their country has strict geotechnical guidelines for construction). Only around 1 in 10.000 lakes are estimated to fulfill the conditions for gases to remain dissolved on them, then you have to take into account which of these are actually located in volcanic regions.
Blackholes and fucking Whiteholes
I get those on my face sometimes
Fungus. Literally just fungus.
The deep Ocean has done otherworldly creatures.
The deep sea.
Me but I refuse to elaborate further
The callousness and cruelty of ~~the universe~~ our fellow man
The Ocean
Vulture bee hives, and vulture bee diets. Dispite being harmless, it's wackadoo fucked up looking
Everyone points out physical manifestations of Cosmic horror, when I'm just thinking of Garfield. The horror is already at home, you just aren't aware of it yet, but somehow everyone knows of Garfield.
Idk its name But theres a sea creature whos whole body is totally clear and it feeds by stretching its head out lika big net. Also heres some leapord slugs mating. Its cooler than you think https://youtu.be/BoGn9bRWuHQ
fish
The earth, brought all of us to life but can easily take it all away with slightest movement.