Weird Things Begin to Happen When You Go into Deep Space

Deep space fear isn’t just about emptiness—it’s about learning that the universe’s most “known” facts can be as terrifying as its unknowns. The cosmos is vast enough to trigger astrophobia (or cosmophobia/space phobia), but the deeper sting comes from discoveries that turn once-mysterious regions into places with conditions that would make nightmares feel safe by comparison. Planets, stars, black holes, and even the space between galaxies all carry built-in hostility, and the universe’s expansion ensures that this isolation will only worsen over time.

Jupiter is used as a baseline example of how “planet” can be misleading. It’s a gas giant roughly 11 times wider than Earth, large enough that Earth in Jupiter’s orbit would be destroyed by gravity; a collision would mean absorption into Jupiter’s atmosphere and disappearance into its gas clouds. The imagined experience of trying to navigate it is equally grim: swirling gas, extreme winds, and a final plunge into a planet-wide ocean of glowing, white-hot liquid metallic hydrogen—no solid surface, no refuge.

That pattern repeats beyond the Solar System. Exoplanets are now estimated to number in the tens of billions per galaxy, with the known universe potentially containing as many as 2 trillion galaxies. Among them are worlds that look deceptively Earthlike from afar. HD 189733 b, about 64.5 light-years away, appears as a bright blue “ocean” world in imagery, but is described as a hellscape: temperatures above 2,000°F, winds up to 5,400 mph (claimed as the fastest ever discovered), and constant rainstorms of molten glass shards that would shred a visitor in a fiery atmospheric tornado.

Stars scale the terror further. Massive stars such as WOH G64 are portrayed as enormous energy engines—so large that, if placed at the center of the Solar System, they would span the orbits of Mercury through Jupiter. When such stars die, their collapse can produce supernovae and, for sufficiently massive stars, black holes. Inside a black hole lies a singularity—described as infinitely dense and infinitely small—where current understanding breaks down, and even the question of whether the singularity “exists” in a meaningful way remains unresolved.

The most unsettling geography may be emptiness itself. Intergalactic space makes up most of the universe’s volume, and “super voids” are regions with far fewer galaxies. Boötes Void (spelled “boa’s void” in the transcript) is given a diameter around 330 million light-years—millions of times larger than the scale of even the largest black holes cited, such as TON 618 (at least 240 billion miles across). The universe’s expansion then adds a time-based horror: galaxies drift farther apart, making future detection of other civilizations increasingly impossible.

Against this backdrop, the transcript turns to human artifacts—Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, launched by NASA in 1977—carrying Golden Records of images, music, sounds, greetings, and instructions. In the far future, these probes could be among the last remnants of humanity, even as Earth and its makers fade away. The closing message reframes fear through exposure: seeing the scale and hostility of space can be terrifying, but it also highlights how narrowly life has been able to exist—on a planet positioned “just right” in time, size, and distance from lethal cosmic conditions.