Space is Terrifying - Astrophobia

[Music] this is a time lapse of the Voyager 2 probes approach to the most distant planet in our solar system Neptune the background noise is composed of various internal radio and software sounds broadcasted back to Earth along with the pictures and video of the planet when I was much much younger and saw Neptune for the first time my first thought was that of an oceanic planet after all its dark blue hue and its white clouds somewhat resemble an aerial view of the Pacific Ocean and it's even named Neptune after the Roman god of the sea

so it's easy to picture how an imaginative five-year-old could come up with that conclusion but of course that's not actually what Neptune is and the reality of it all is much much scarier than what my little kid's self ever could have guessed me foreign isn't in Ocean world it's an ice giant far from something like the planet Hoth from Star Wars or serpaden from Star Trek an ice giant is basically identical to a gas giant with the only real differences being their size and certain Elemental and chemical makeups of its chaotic and deep atmosphere which

means you have a planet with no solid surface to speak of anywhere it's just layers upon layers of thick cold and increasingly darkening pressurized gas I don't remember how young I was when I first learned about the true nature of gas and ice giants but I remember exactly what I felt beer and I remember my thoughts uniformly racing with the same exclamation space is terrifying thank you even now as a 20 year old gas and ice giants are planets that can easily put me on edge even just by simply looking at a picture of one

of these massive worlds I feel an overlooming presence of intimidation after all they aren't given the label of giant for no reason and for me Jupiter is the very epitome of this feeling if the planet Earth were to ever hypothetically Korean towards an impact a planet like Jupiter we wouldn't even be given the Dignity of going out with an explosive asteroid-like Collision we would simply just be burnt up in and swallowed by Jupiter's large atmosphere and swallowed isn't necessarily an inappropriate way to describe it either as our planet would likely just be absorbed and coalesced

into Jupiter's metallic liquid like lower layers there'd be no evidence that our planet ever even existed we'd just be erased from the cosmos and touching on that subject a bit is the fact that these planets have no definable surface to speak of this in my mind gas and ice giants the most alien worlds that can possibly exist as strange and mysterious as worlds like Venus and Mars can be at least they have a ground that a human could actually technically stand on top of but here there is no familiarity to speak of nothing even remotely

terrestrial if you ever were to manage being caught in Jupiter's gravity to the point you ended up falling towards the planet it'd likely be a terrifying and intensely anxious death as you found yourself becoming engulfed in clouds for miles until the light from the sun became snuffed out and you plummeted endlessly in darkness until the pressure became so high that your body pops like a bug in a fire and even if you had some special sci-fi suit that let you survive in such high pressures you'd still eventually find yourself being smothered and burned alive in

a white hot Global sea of liquid metallic hydrogen and Saturn is no different don't let the beauty of its rings fool you this planet is every every bit as violent and inhospitable as Jupiter even more so actually as wind speeds in Saturn's upper atmosphere can clock in at over a thousand miles per hour speeds high enough to easily kill a person in fact storms on Saturn have been charted going so fast that they're able to race around the planet and meet their own tails before they have a chance to dissipate and of course these storms

and Global deep formations of clouds or give our gas giants or iconic looks and are what lend greatly to their terrifying Aura the most famous of which is Jupiter's Great Red Spot a massive cyclonic hurricane that has been known to exist since the 17th century but has likely existed for hundreds or even thousands of years before that and could quite possibly be a permanent feature of the planet a storm so large and deep that the planet Earth wouldn't even fill it and even when looked at up close its layers of clouds are challenging to tell

apart with the unaided eye more troubling for me however is the large hexagonal storm constantly raging a top Saturn's North Pole without saying a word I'm gonna show you a few very real close-up images of this massive storm taking years back by the Cassini space probe foreign this last picture in particular sends chills up my spine and it's somewhat hard for me to look at without feeling anxious it truly feels like I'm staring into an abyss the vortex-like layering of the many rotating Cloud layers and the seemingly almost unaffected Cloud layer residing deep at its

Center just illustrate the sheer mass of atmosphere that Saturn is but as terrifying as the vast complex endless clouds of the gas giants can be the inverse of them is equally as such this is Uranus no not Uranus not your rectum even say it with me Uranus possibly the most ominous appearing of all the planets in our solar system whereas Jupiter Saturn and Neptune are all filled with swirls of cloud belts and pockmarked by storms Uranus is near uniformly a teal color with only a few visible cloud formations and it seemingly tranquil atmosphere its own

belts only obviously visible when looking through different Spectras of light but of course this planet is any anything but tranquil every bit as inhospitable as the other gas worlds Uranus hosts a large gaseous atmosphere and intense wind speeds and to add insult to injury Uranus is the coldest planet in the entire solar system with an upper atmospheric average temperature of negative 350 degrees Fahrenheit so if intense winds and pressures don't kill you it'll likely be an intense case of hypothermia and finally after Uranus we reach the outermost planet Neptune sorry Pluto what bothers me most

about Neptune more so than its deep blue color and darkened storms is the sheer amount of mystery surrounding it to give you an idea of just how remote Neptune is the average distance between the Earth and Saturn is the average distance between Uranus and Neptune that's about a billion miles worth of what is just about empty space just to cross into a single planetary system it's so far removed from all the other planets that it's only ever been visited once by the Voyager 2 probe and likely won't be visited by humans again for quite some

time even Uranus in recent years has had the privilege of being talked about in regards to probing missions but not Neptune and although great work has been done in regards to neptunian exploration by the way of Voyager 2 and several space-based telescopes Neptune still holds a great many unknowns for me this picture will likely always be what comes to mind when I think of Neptune seeing the deep blue hue of its deep atmosphere amidst the backdrop of space is akin to seeing a face in the dark of the corner of your room late at night

unknown foreboding almost too unreal to comprehend pure and paralyzing beer far far removed from the oceanic-like world that resided in the imagination of my younger self foreign it's hard for me as someone who's only ever lived in the 21st century to imagine a point in time where the idea of planets beyond our own solar system was actually debated upon in fact the knowledge of their existence is relatively new as the first confirmation of an extrasolar planet or exoplanet didn't take place until 1992. literally the same year Wolfenstein 3D came out prior to that the realm

of alien planets was relegated to Scientific debate and the ponderings of philosophers as far back as ancient Greece and yet in the mere 30 or so years we've been looking into exoplanets we've already made numerous mind warping discoveries that give hope to and in some cases surpass our most fantastic fantasies Earth-like terrestrial worlds some with surface water and some twice or even three times as massive as their own Planet worlds with superheated steam atmospheres Oceanic worlds was seized possibly as deep as hundreds of miles and worlds where the rain is potentially made from diamonds and

even glass or wait glass rain and deep oceans foreign although when it comes to exoplanets there's little that can be definitively proven given the vast distances between us and Them we've nonetheless discovered worlds that can be described as nightmarish even hellish one of the firsts to come to mind is a planet known as trez 2B orbiting within the Tres 2 binary star system beyond the fact that the planet is likely a gas giant larger than Jupiter which makes it terrifying enough the planet is thought to be the darkest ever discovered despite being the first planet

in line to orbit its host star trez 2B reflects less than one percent of all the light that hits its Cloud tops that's quite literally blacker than coal and given its proximity to its star the planet is estimated to have an average atmospheric temperature of over 2 900 degrees Fahrenheit meaning that in between its dark black cloud tops there's likely a deep dark red glow emanating from the planet's interior and for all we know it's the only thing to distinguishing the planet from the backdrop of space the best way to describe such a planet can

be done in one word hell but even deadlier still is another hot and hellish World known as HD 189733b man they should really start naming these places a hot Jupiter world where the wind speeds can reach an estimated 8 700 miles per hour but beyond its temperature and intolerable wind speeds and noxious gases there's something far deadlier and something far more unsettling the clouds of this gas giant are laced with silicate particles that coalesce into shards of glass-like material and this material is propelled around the planet sideways at speeds many times over the speed of

a bullet I don't know about you but as someone who finds even paper guts to be extremely upsetting the idea of high speed sideways falling glass storms really gets under my skin quite literally but moving away from the already already established Terror of gas giants terrestrial exoplanets are no stranger to being horrific places to find yourself stranded on one of the farthest known exoplanets to exist is a planet known as uh Jesus o g l e 2005 blg 390 l b holy Jesus what is that what the is that thankfully I won't have to continue

calling it that though because many simply refer to it as hot located near the Galactic core at over 21 000 light years away Hoth is believed to be what is known as a super earth type world as this rocky planet is about an estimated five and a half times the mass of Earth its surface temperature is one of the coldest known at about negative 370 degrees Fahrenheit its massive surface is likely to be completely Frozen and possibly even snow covered with frozen water methane ammonia and nitrogen making up both the physical ground and possible precipitation

but beyond the many terrestrial and Rocky worlds we've discovered whether tidally locked molten Frozen or whether they be venus-like or possibly similar to Earth none terrify me more than the ocean World while places like the beach are extremely fun to be in don't scare me in the slightest I also admit that if I were to ever find myself floating above say a the Mariana Trench I would undoubtedly feel an overwhelming sense of Terror and an adrenaline-filled need to immediately escape the water that's why despite their familiarity and their possibly human friendly environments ocean worlds fill

me with this Primal sense of unease and make me shiver somewhat in my own skin it's also likely WHY games like subnautica have such a powerful attraction for a lot of people including myself the idea of a planet out there somewhere right now being so alluringly hospitable yet so immensely unchartable and mysterious dangerous even is a chilling thought like some sort of potential Cosmic trap set especially for mankind one of the most promising candidates for such a place is the exoplanet gleesa 1214b often just referred to as the Water World a super earth type Planet

located at a relatively close distance to 48 light years it's believed to be made up of a global liquid water ocean with an atmosphere May made up of hydrogen helium and possibly water vapor if our admittedly limited data about 1214 is correct then it's likely that this Global ocean at its deepest points reaches all the way down to the planet's own core and I'm just saying if I ever found myself over an ocean trench that deep I'd likely just drop dead of a stroke-inducing panic attack it's a horrifying combination of both astrophobia and thalassophobia the

fear of seas and oceans the idea of a planet's core being right beneath you even if visibly cloaked by hundreds of miles of Dark Water is such a horrific thought that I feel anxious just thinking about it it's even somewhat akin to the very same fear that I have with gas giants however even Beyond staring into the deep abyss of an ocean that's touching a planet's core the Mind races with ideas of what the planet's Global Marine environment might consist of what vast networks are both shallow and deep trenches and reefs must exists on such

a planet what sort of underwater ranges and canyons could possibly be discovered and charted and the most Eerie question of all what sort of Life Could you expect to find with how deep and extreme an environment This Global sea must be we could only ever imagine how horrific an alien like any life forms on 1214 could possibly be on earth the deepest known ocean depth is only about seven miles below the sea and life even at just that distance alone becomes unimaginably strange and unearthly in appearance to think of what kind of life could possibly

exist hundreds of miles below the sea or even just a couple dozen miles under at that the Mind races with possibilities of what Horrors could possibly be lurking in the dark depths [Music] thank you we live at an amazing time in regards to astronomy we now more so than any other time in all of human history have amazing and unparalleled access to viewing outer space and with cutting-edge tools such as the Hubble and James Webb Space telescopes we have become spoiled with the amount of information that's available and is still being actively gathered on exoplanets

far-off galaxies and Grand sweeping Stellar natural processes and in this Zeitgeist of Frontier information gathering it seems many people have forgotten and even find boring something much closer to home our own solar system with how much time has passed since we first started to really observe the planets up close and with how many observatories and probes we've constructed to gather images and data of these strange worlds you'd think there'd be little left for us to discover in reality however these places are still as much a mystery to us as anything beyond the orc Cloud as

stated earlier Neptune has only only ever been visited once in all of human history in fact much of what we know about the ice giant comes from the 1989 flyby made by the Voyager 2 probe so Neptune despite being within our own solar system and being four times wider than Earth is still to this day one of the most unknown objects in such close proximity to our planet the same applies as well to its largest moon Triton and arguably more intriguing world than Neptune itself Triton is one of the great moons of the solar system

coming in at seventh largest at a diameter of about 1680 miles yet despite its size to this day only about 40 percent of its surface has been mapped when Voyager 2 made its approach to Triton in 89 it discovered a moon far removed from a gray and desolate dust covered rock like our own cryovolcanoes active geysers and frozen lakes were all spotted across Triton's icy surface as well as thin layers of clouds in its upper atmosphere Triton also plays host to a unique type of terrain not known to exist on any other planet cantaloupe terrain

large stretches of land crisscrossed by grooves and Fishers giving rise to Triton's iconic and Majestic appearance however more so than looking pretty these fishers on top of the presence of geysers and an apparent lack of meteorite craters are all pieces of evidence that suggest the existence of a large Subterranean ocean that is consistently renewing the moon's surface an ocean that could very well be in contact with the moon's mantle leading to the possible presence of thermal vents which like on Earth would result in a warm and mineral-rich sea for life to arise in needless to

say I hope that someday we'll be able to return to the neptunian system if not for Neptune then certainly at least for triton but while Triton as a whole is a very unique place it may well shock you to hear that the prospect of habitable subsurface oceans is not some something solely present on Triton in fact these oceans may very well be quite common across the outer solar system Triton isn't even the prime candidate for this possibility anyway Europa one of the four Galilean moons of Jupiter up until the arrival of the Voyager probes in

1979 Europa like all the other Jovian moons was completely unknown to us its appearance its exact size and mass and its chemical makeup were all things we had little to no information about but what exactly was found surpassed all of our wildest expectations and has led to a decades-long interest in finding out more about the small Moon that many might consider more intriguing than its own host planet Jupiter because this is the most likely candidate we know of in the entire known universe to be another world that hosts life when first looking at europa's surface

you're confronted with a vast gray and white landscape with a reddish and brownish cracks in Fishers Crossing all over the surface a surface composed mainly of water ice and underneath this hardest Granite icy terrain is very likely a planet-wide subsurface ocean partially or entirely in contact with the moons believed to be hot mantle leading to the very real possibility of thermal vents providing minerals and heat to this massive ocean creating conditions similar to how the conditions were within Earth's Own Seas when life first arose on our planet it's a prospect that's so probable and widely

believed in that it's a popular subject within science fiction particularly the well-made party indie game Bearer trauma a game where you and your friends go around in a custom-made submarine underneath europa's surface completing missions for various European political factions that range from hunting down monsters alien sea creatures and raiding hostile submarines in deep sea stations while for now in the year 2023 such a concept is total fiction games like Bearer trauma could One Day become a reality for any possible europan colonists and when NASA's Europa Clipper and esa's Juice missions right around the corner we

may very well have answers to europa's life question within our own lifetimes and if it does turn out to be there even in the most microbial of forms it will no doubt be a massive change to The Human Condition throughout all the annals of human history while the Pharaohs reigned over Egypt the Emperors over Rome and all the wars and battles waged that shaped our very existence as humans there was on a distant snowball just 500 million miles away a completely unknown and mysterious alien ecosystem chugging along none the wiser to everything we've ever done

or accomplished a lesson in humility if there ever was one thank you [Music] for as shrouded in mystery as extra solar systems our own Heavenly neighbors and all the other celestial objects of our galaxy can be they all combined can never even hope to hold a candle up to the Enigma that is the very universe itself our universe is so large and is so old that it goes beyond scale the observable universe on its own from a human perspective is a seemingly infinite distance across and is likely still only an extremely small fraction of the

size of the total Universe even if humanity is guaranteed billions of years to continue existing and is guaranteed the opportunity to spread out across our galaxy colonizing new planets and inventoring wondrous new technologies we could never even hope to ever have a chance at answering every question the universe throws our way even at the most local of levels for me some of the most attractive objects in the sky are the galaxies of our own local Galaxy group our local group is made up of at least 80 individual galaxies many of which being small dwarf galaxies

that orbit around the larger ones out of all these galaxies the Milky Way is the second largest at an approximate diameter of over a hundred thousand light years but even for such an incredible size it's shown up by the first largest galaxy in our group The Andromeda galaxy which is over two hundred thousand light years in diameter an object so large and close by that it's easily visible to the naked eye at night and has been known to exist since at least the Bronze Age little is actually known about Andromeda outside of its more General

details however one very interesting thing to know is the possible discovery of an extra Galactic Planet within the Andromeda galaxy now much of the evidence is debated upon but it is possible that we've in the past discovered an exoplanet around a star in the Andromeda galaxy a planet called PA 99n2 if it really exists it's likely around six times as massive as Jupiter personally I'm somewhat doubtful of its existence but it still is interesting to think of the idea that we may someday possibly even within our lifetimes be able to decisively detect exoplanets outside of

our own Galaxy galaxies are massive structures the scale of just one of them is beyond human comprehension one hundred thousand light years two hundred thousand light years what do these numbers even mean they're so massive that we can't even properly picture them in our minds we already mentioned our own local Galactic neighborhood but as you zoom out the scale becomes much more terrifying our own local group is itself a small part of a larger clustering of galaxies the Virgo supercluster a large structure composed of an estimated 100 local groupings containing about a hundred thousand individual

galaxies but Virgo is itself only the tip of the Spear of an even grander structure the lanakia supercluster a structure made up of not only Virgo but several different smaller superclusters groupings and terrifyingly voids one of which apparently the Milky Way is a part of which is chilling to think about so lenacula is huge right so huge it seems hard to come up with anything you could further zoom out to see but the scale can still get bigger much bigger linakia itself is only a small fraction out of a large structure known as the Pisces

cetus supercluster complex a type of Galactic filament aside from just the intimidating and kind of badass label of filament Galaxy filaments are scary in their sheer size as far as we could tell from the confines of the solar system filaments are the largest known structures to occur within the universe or at least the observable universe massive as they may be scientists are still able somewhat map their size from the lab and for me what is to be seen is beyond uncanny it's almost as if I'm looking at a picture of Earth's night side and not

the largest structures in the universe filaments are in fact so large that we can't even be sure that some of the ones we've discovered even exist as they seemingly destroy our understanding of how large Universal structures can possibly be no more is this apparent than with the Hercules Corona Borealis Great Wall again scary but badass name sounds like the name of a metal album if it really exists then it is the largest structure ever discovered in the observable universe by a landslide residing six to ten billion light years away from the earth the Great Wall

is approximately 10 billion light years across meaning that light from one end of the structure takes about 10 billion years to reach the other end for comparison the estimated age of the universe is around 13.7 billion years old it's an object so old and redshifted that it's detectable only by a phenomenon known as gamma ray bursts intense energetic explosions shooting off gamma radiation into space at the speed of light detectable even as far as 13 billion light years away which hold the phone is an incredible thought in it of itself the farthest known gamma-ray burst

grb-090429b catchy was recorded at an approximate distance of 13.14 billion light years away from Earth the margin of error notwithstanding that would make this single Cosmic event only about 600 million years younger than the universe as the energy it released needed over 13 billion years to reach us it's so old that it's essentially guaranteed this grb has long since gone cold its energetic Jets and hot accretion discs snuffed out billions of years before there's signals ever even reached us the energy we record from it today is just its ghost an echo from a distance and

bygone era of the universe's history that really is the real Crux of the matter right for me it's the universe's most cruelest of properties distance the scale of the very universe itself and the disheartening time it takes to Traverse it even at its fastest known natural speed it will always play against us and whatever else that may live within it even if you woke up tomorrow and light speed travel had been perfected and all the moons and terrestrial bodies of our solar system were colonized it would still take four years to reach the nearest star

Alpha Centauri and even if over the course of countless Generations we managed to colonize the entire Orion arm of the Galaxy a human on one end of the arm could never in a hundred lifetimes hope to meet someone else from the opposite end and even if we colonized our whole Gala Galaxy and saw firsthand all the Wonders there were to see and solved all of the Mysteries of the Milky Way leaving our own Galaxy if that's something even possible to do would essentially be a restart to human civilization any colonists who would arrive in Andromeda

or triangulum would have no contact with the Milky Way and for all they know humans in the Milky Way could be entirely gone anyway any Mysteries they're met with would be solely their own to Bear our own existence be damned but maybe that's the point despite our Timeless and beloved stories of massive Space Battles heroes and villains and Galactic political struggles maybe the point of our existence in space if there even is a point to it isn't to play politician nor to fight in Epic Battles nor to create a vast and connected space-faring Empire but

is instead one of redefining ourselves to find all we can possibly find and know all we can possibly know with the little time we have left to try our best in making space our universe less terrifying [Music] foreign [Music] thank you