this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2024
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Cosmic Horror
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"cosmic horror... is a subgenre of horror fiction and weird fiction that emphasizes the horror of the unknowable and incomprehensible more than gore or other elements of shock... themes of cosmic dread, forbidden and dangerous knowledge, madness, non-human influences on humanity, religion and superstition, fate and inevitability, and the risks associated with scientific discoveries... the sense that ordinary life is a thin shell over a reality that is so alien and abstract in comparison that merely contemplating it would damage the sanity of the ordinary person, insignificance and powerlessness at the cosmic scale..."
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Fun fact: If there was air between us and the sun to carry sound, we would constantly hear it roaring at around 100dB (as loud as a jackhammer).
More fun facts: ~~When the stars are right~~ In approximately 5 billion years, the sun will ~~awake from his slumber~~ enter in his red giant phase and ~~devour~~ engulf Mercury, Venus, and possibly also the Earth.
And some previous sun(s), after growing into even larger red giants, created most of the matter you see around you in an act of such violence it likely destroyed any planets they hadn't devoured.
And some of what it created still contains enough rage to make the most violent creations humanity had made--up to the point when we realized we could use that to power an even more violent creation: a brief and miniature version of our slumbering sun.
It will eat Earth and at some point the heat will likely make all the planets and their satellites unsuitable for humans. There might be a possibility for life on Pluto though.
Pluto’s gonna get the last word after the other planets kicked him out of the planet club
Well not really, it's not like Pluto's mass(1/6 of our Moon) will grow much in that time. But there are evidences of water on Pluto and even suggestions of underground liquid water oceans(due to it's core's heat) so it may be suitable for life even now.
roaring
...or screaming
Can we agree on shrieking?
Who's to say it's doing something vocally at all? Perhaps it's simply breathing but our feeble biology cannot handle its immense power.
how do we know it wouldn't sound like an opera singer holding the longest sustained note in the universe?
Another fun fact: If we could hear the sun and it would suddenly disappear we would still hear it for another 13 to 14 years.
Not eight minutes and twenty seconds?
Not even an edit: I typed this then realized I was thinking of the speed of light, not sound. Sorry for doubting you.
If there was air between us and the sun we would long have been burned to a crisp, though.
Why is this so comforting
How so? And at what frequency?
Cause it's basically an ongoing explosion.
And supposedly it would sound something like a huge waterfall.
I can't help but wonder what effect that would have on life. Assuming that there's a circumstance where a form of life can somehow be exposed to the infinite roar of its benevolent tyrant - what would that do to hearing? Would life even develop hearing? I can't imagine things like echolocation would be very useful, but I'm just some dude thinking about our eldritch sun god. Idk.
We'd probably be safe from the "Quiet Place" monsters, at least.
i love the idea of hearing being a niche thing that only exists in caves sufficiently insulated from the surface, it would definitely make vision even more popular than it is as it stands
Yeah, I'd have to wonder if surface eyes would become stronger as a result. Think a Quiet Place monsters but instead of sensitive hearing they have eagle eyes and night vision. Scary stuff.
No, it is not an ongoing explosion. It is in equilibrium, an explosion is not, that is it's defining thing. Why should it sound like water when the processes happen on far larger scales (lower frequencies)? They should almost exclusively be inaudible.
Do you know how loud it would be if you were right next to it, assuming it was all surrounded by air?
Sunshine is (almost) Cosmic Horror: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Gaj5T6Q6UM
[Edit] I forgot the best one. SCP 001 When Day Breaks: https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/shaggydredlocks-proposal
I've always loved this movie even if the "science" behind restarting fusion in the sun was nonsense
Really great movie.
Dammit I must have clicked outside my subscriptions again.
So anyway here's a reminder that if you take a stellar lifetime and map it down to something like a human lifetime, the relative slowness of the speed of light mostly goes away, down to something within an reasonable approximation of the speed of sound in air, give or take.
This means that stars, at least in close proximity to each other, could theoretically be having conversations (by means of light across vacuum) that to them, don't seem to take all that long at all.
And they have all that boiling mass doing who knows what and so much real time to think...
the relative slowness of the speed of light mostly goes away, down to something within an reasonable approximation of the speed of sound in air, give or take.
Nice try buddy, the ratio is 138 times higher for stars / lightspeed than it is human / soundspeed, not to mention the distance at which we have conversations is 1 human wide, clearly not the same between stars.
I admit it's been a while since I did the calculations so I must have misremembered the speed of sound part.
Trying again now (with less brain than I once had) I think you could still get a few million intercommunications between stars hundreds of light years apart within their lifespans, and stars only a handful of light years apart could be even more chatty.
You're comparing based on size. I think lifespan would be more relevant. Let's compare a 10 billion year lifespan to a 100 year lifespan. That makes 1 year of human life equivalent to 100 million years of a star's life. So a distance of 10 light years would mean 10 years for a message to get across. Which, at the 1 to 100 million time rate difference, still means an equivalent of 3 seconds. So yeah, communication would be slower than for humans, even for relatively close neighbors.
The op in op re-invented reasons for sun worship.
Now lets pull a necron and let's use the star god to power our civilization.
some people just want to be herded