Thursday, June 11, 2020

AskReddit Thread: Scariest Space Facts And Mysteries


Someone on AskReddit got a thread going about the scariest space facts and mysteries that people know about. It's easy to forget that we're on a giant rock flying and falling and spinning madly on through space. I mean, we forget to look up at the sky enough as it is. Maybe a convenient forgetfulness. 

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White - Blubari • 19h МОBILE BLACK HOLES Reply 13.1k ...

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Text - sosogos • 16h 1 Award Here's one closer to home. The Kessler Effect is the theory that a single destructive event in Low earth orbit could create a cascade where satellites break up into tiny fragments taking out other satellites, breaking up into smaller fragments and so on, until the earth is completely surrounded by a massive cloud of tiny flying death shrapnel which would make leaving this planet almost impossible. If you look up how much space debris there is already up there and how

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White - gummby8 • 19h S 2 Awards Moon's haunted Reply 5.2k ...

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Text - Sabz5150 • 19h The Great Attractor. A... thing... that affects the motion of galaxies for hundreds of millions of light years. Reply 15.7k ...

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Text - skakodker • 17h 1 Award Voyager 1 will outlive planet earth. EDIT: Wow! Didn't expect this post would generate so much interest. Couple of clarifications. First, I was referring to Voyager 1 not 2 - so fixed that. (Which is not to say that Voyager 2 also won't also outlive planet earth.) Second, my source mentions that it is "plausible" to imagine that Voyager 1 will outlive our planet given how incomprehensibly vast space really is. You can watch the interesting and rather fun video here

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Text - Alan_Bun • 17h 1 Award Gamma Ray Bursts. We could be hit by one of these with very little warning, and if it was reasonably close (in universal terms anyway) could wipe us out rapidly or cause a ton of damage. Dark Matter/Dark Energy The fact that about 95% of the universe is made up of matter we can't see or detect is pretty unsettling to think about. Also, while not a fact per-se, Ilike to think that perhaps the answer to the Fermi Paradox is that there are billions of advanced alien li

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Text - DetroitUberDriver • 18h 1 Award Honestly my vote is for dark matter. The overwhelming majority of matter in the universe is a complete mystery to us. I think it would be pretty cool if we discovered that it was matter from parallel universes that we simply can't interact with. And to them we are dark matter. Reply 3.2k ...

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Text - Marycate11 • 18h 2 Awards Vacuum decay is one of the scariest concepts to me. We don't know if it exists, and we won't know until it's too late. Reply 15.8k ...

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Text - Tartokwetsh • 20h I can't accept the fact that there is no end in space. But if there is indeed an end, then... what's beyond it? I'm stucked in absurdity.

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Text - the_Athereon • 19h On the surface of Mars right now is a Blur CD God help us if aliens find that first. Reply 6.7k ...

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Text - Back2Bach • 20h Rogue planets: Planets that do not follow any given orbit. They may have been in an orbit at one time, but now they refuse to "play by the rules." They were most likely knocked out of their orbit by another body, and now they are set on doing the same. Reply 1 17.7k ...

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Text - blahblahrasputan • 16h 1 Award Ever gone on a road trip and hit a patch where you're just driving for hours and you don't see anything exciting? I've experienced this in Australia, Canada and USA, all very large countries. Imagine doing that for years travelling to another planet.. Reply 5.8k

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Text - Scovundra • 18h I think everything is terrifying about space, and I fucking love it. But one thing it scare me a lot, it's if space in infinite, imagine what kind of gigantic monster can be in there Reply 1 6.3k ...

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Text - PM_Me_Nudes_2_Review • 19h Since the universe is expanding and stars and galaxies are moving away from each other, it's possible that civilizations that spring up in the far future with lonely stars will see an empty sky. Their civilizations will grow and learn, but they will never know the universe that once was. We live in a spectacular time period where we can actually look back in time and see the early universe, future civilizations won't have that luxury. They'll believe that the un

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Text - Regretful_Bastard • 19h 1 Award The sheer distance between things. It's scary and somewhat depressing. Reply 28.4k ...

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Text - iErrored_x • 19h The fact that an asteroid could come at any time, and even though we have the technology to tell us that an asteroid is about to impact Earth, what can we really do about it? Nothing. We can do nothing. We can just sit here, with the media stations telling us what will happen, telling our friends and loved ones good-bye, praying, etc. It sucks. Why do we have the technology that tells us our inevitable doom is days, or even moments, away but no technology to possibly stop

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Text - Andromeda321 • 18h 9 Awards Astronomer here! There are a lot of things posted here that are not really likely to happen any time soon or affect your life on Earth much. So, if you want something to worry about, may I introduce you to the Carrington Event of 1859. Basically Carrington was a scientist who noticed a flash from a huge cluster of sunspots, which was the biggest coronal mass ejection from the sun ever recorded (aka a ton of material ejected from the sun at high speeds). It hit

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Text - canned_shrimp• 19h what was before the big bang? I think it is just impossible for a human to comprehend pure nothing or infinity. I myself had a stroke at age nine due to a ruptured vertebral artery and lost a third of my visual field. I can confirm that it is not black, a good analogy is it is like what you see behind your head. on the other hand, infinity is so large that if you spent your whole life writing a one then zeros on paper, that insane number would still be 0% of infinity. I

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Text - Thopterthallid • 18h The Great Attractor is kinda ominous. There's an exo planet with wind that's many times the speed of sound and that rains glass. Another exo planet that has spent time inside it's star. There's a sort of fear that we aren't alone in the universe. Chances are anything we meet won't have remotely similar emotional spectrums that we have. Then there's the horrifying notion that we ARE alone in that infinite blackness. That we're just a fluke of chemistry that will probab

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Text - Graytortoise351 • 18h The fact that a city killing asteroid can slip through our detection systems and kill millions at any moment. Reply 1 494 ...

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Text - melekh88 • 17h A few people have said this but just the size of space is creepy to me. That far away.... but what almost depresses me more that unlike in Stargate I will never be able to travel to any of it. Would love to see whats out there. Reply 106 ...

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Text - The_Piano_Girl • 19h S 1 Award There is no guarantee that the universe won't end in the next 10 seconds. Edit: There are people who are confused. I'm just saying that with the uncertainty of it all, it could be possible. Not saying it will, it could, unlikely, but it isn't impossible Edit: Thank you so much, u/jewbacca207 for the silver!!!! I really appreciate it!!! I had kind of a horrible start to my day, and the fact that someone appreciates something that I didn't like that much turne

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Text - tylerss20 • 19h Space is big. More than people can easily grasp. I absolutely believe other intelligent life exists, I absolutely believe earth-like planets with orbits in their star's habitable zone and liquid water exist, and I absolutely believe that with enough time humanity will confirm the existence of both. I also believe manned spacecraft will never leave our solar system. The time and energy required just to reach orbit is massive, the resources necessary to keep a person alive i

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Text - VaultBoi14 • 20h Getting sucked into a black hole literally turns you into spaghetti... Reply 1.1k ...

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Text - WreckNRepeat • 18h Strange matter. It might not exist at all, but some scientists believe it's what's inside neutron stars. If this is true, neutron stars can collide and send strange matter particles flying through space. It's also theorized that strange matter might turn everything it touches into strange matter. If that's true, any microscopic amount of strange matter that touches our atmosphere would quickly turn Earth and everything on it into strange matter, destroying all life and

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Text - Snaz5 • 15h The Boltzmann Brain The most likely ending to our universe will be all stars and black holes exploding and eventually the universe becomes a completely even soup of neutrons for all eternity. In this theory, the big bang was actually a cosmic coincidence, in which enough of those neutrons (literally every neutron that currently exists) collided in the even soup of a PAST universe. This collision caused the big bang to occur, thrusting into motion the energies that run our curr

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