Horror Vacui, Part 4

Vacui or fear of the void or fear of the vacuum, a concept that has relevance in art and design, where it describes an impulse to fill in blank or uniform spaces with detail, as well as relevance in philosophy and in physics, where it's been used to describe the longstanding belief, often derived from Aristotle, that a vacuum or a void could not exist in nature, and that empty space was

in fact an incoherent concept. So in the previous episode of this one, we talked about how this view in physics persisted through the Middle Ages and part of the early Modern period in Europe, and important experiments by figures like Evangelista Torcelli, the man with the batman symbol for a mustache, or rob I think, as you pointed out at the sort of the crucifix goatee h as sort of the crucifix Van Dyke, Yeah, yeah, him and uh

and Blaze. Pascal, of course, established that an approximate vacuum could actually be created inside a glass tube, and that the force truly responsible for preventing a void from forming in most cases, such as in the case of like a pump or a siphon, was not nature's mysterious hatred for vacuums, but in fact the weight of the air

we breathe, known today as atmospheric pressure. But something we alluded to in the previous episode is also the fact that while the laws of nature don't exactly rule out a vacuum in the way that Aristotle and the Scholastics thought, there is also some nuance to the issue, because you can create an approximate vacuum, but it's really hard or perhaps impossible to create a perfect vacuum, depending on how

you define your goals. When we talk about a vacuum in like real world examples, instead of you know, ideal thought experiments, we are never talking about completely empty spaces

with no particles whatsoever. Instead, we're usually talking about an area where the density of gas particles is very low, or the inside of a container where the density of gas particles is much lower than the density of particles on the outside, and the latter type of vacuum, where a container that has a lower density of gas particles than the world outside is is common throughout the world of technology and electrical appliances and scientific equipment, especially of

years past, but still somewhat today. A couple of classic examples incandescent light bulbs. They make light by running current through a filament. It gets so hot that it starts to emit photons starts to glow. But these bulbs are not full of air at regular atmospheric pressure, and if they were, that would be a problem. The filament would

tend to fail very quickly. That's not good for incandescent bulbs, so instead they are typically either filled with an inert gas like argon or nitrogen, or they are pumped out to contain a vacuum. The earliest light bulbs were vacuum based rather than inert gas based. Another component used in electronics, one that will be very familiar to electric guitar players, as vacuum tubes, which were once commonly used to manipulate

current to amplify and rectify electrical signals. They've been replaced with silicon transistors in most modern devices, but they still have their uses. And by the way, if you want to see something really weird and awesome, look up pictures of vacuum tube based computers. Before transistors took over to become the logic circuitry inside computers. I guess that happened roughly around the sixties or so. But before that, the information processing in computers was done on large arrays of

vacuum tubes. And I'm very tempted to say like that, I wish to see a certain kind of computer snobbery arise where they're like gamers who are like, oh, you play on transistors, I've got a vacuum tube rig. Yeah. Some of the images that come up from me they look very uh, there's a mad science quality to these. They look like there's some sort of strange experiment containing uh,

you know, contained gases or something. Yeah, it does look like that because they look like almost like kind of like pills in a blister pack, you know, the little blisters popping out. But they're they're not containing special gases. They are containing lower density of gases. What that what

those tubes contain is relatively nothing compared to the atmosphere. Uh. Now, one place tubes are still popular in electrical devices today is in guitar amplifiers, where a lot of players prefer the feeling of playing with tubes as opposed to solid state amps. Rob, I don't know if you've ever come across this debate, you know, sometimes I think people look on the tube preference as a kind of snobbery. Personally, I can see both sides, Like, I think solid state

amps sound great, but tubes are. They're cool? Yeah, I not being a guitar player myself, I rarely get any of these conversations, and I rarely hear any of this. So is this something where I know a lot of a lot of conversations for regarding like retro technology and music and recording and production. It actually does come through to the final product. It actually is something that affects the final sound of the music. Is that the case here?

People argue about this, I mean the people argue about to what extent you can hear the difference in something that comes out of a tube amp versus a a good modern attempt to approximate that with transistors. I'm not going to try to weigh in on one side of the bait here. Uh. Basically, my experience is that. Uh. Solid state amps sound fine, they sound great, but there's

also just something kind of cool about tubes. They might kind of feel differently when you're playing a guitar through one, especially if you're in the room with it, as opposed to listening to a recording. I'm not sure. Yeah, listeners, let us know. Do you think tubes are tubular or do you think solid state is solid? I don't know. I will weigh in and say I think it's a stupid thing to like get mad at people or criticize people about one way or another. Calm down, guys, fair enough,

But coming back to the bigger point. In cases like the vacuum lightbulb or the vacuum tube for current amplification, Uh, the area inside the glass and these devices is again not a perfect vacuum. There are particles of atmosphere in there, they're just way fewer of them than in an equivalent area outside. And there are actually designations for the different

levels of vacuum that are achieved through technological means. You know, you can have like a medium vacuum, a high vacuum, and ultra high vacuum uh and uh and and so so that's what's possible on Earth. But then you might be wondering in response to that, Wait a minute, though, isn't outer space at least a vacuum? Isn't isn't the space between the planets or the space between the stars at least a vacuum. Again, the answer here is yes

and no. It depends on what you mean. Space is a vacuum when compared to Earth's atmosphere, and it is even lower density than most partial vacuums created by humans. I was trying to find a good estimate for the density of outer space, and I came across a couple of things in that book I was talking about. In the last episode called the Void by the by the physicist Frank close Uh, he writes about well, he's writing about the reasoning that led people to assume that outer

space was a vacuum. When scientists such as place Pascal started to know, notice that the atmospheric pressure was different at different altitude. So you go up on a mountain,

the atmospheric pressure is lower. That does tend to suggest that if you go higher and higher, the density of particles just keeps getting lower and lower, and you would eventually reach an altitude at which there was effectively no nowhere to breathe anymore, There was no atmosphere anymore, which some people found maybe kind of like threatening in principle or maybe threatening to their theological ideas of how the universe was put together. Nevertheless, you could show it was true.

As you go higher and higher, the density gets lower, so close rights quote, at a height of a hundred kilometers, the pressure is less than a billion of that on the ground, at four hundred kilometers a million million, and en route to the Moon in space it is down by ten to the nineteen, an amount that is less than the size of a proton compared to a kilometer. We can thus say that essentially all of the atmosphere is a thin shell whose thickness is less than one

thousand of the Earth's radius. Wow. I I don't doubt that's true. But that's the kind of thing that I don't even I don't usually picture it that way. I you know, I picture the atmosphere is extending much higher up off the surface of the Earth. Yeah. And you know, for for for me, this like the reality of of the thinning of the air. Uh. At the higher altitude

you get to. This was always kind of spelled out for me by looking at something like the Lockheed you to the spy aircraft that have these just a super long um super a wide wingspan than enabled it one of several design functions, but the most obvious one that enabled it to uh to to to to fly at

such high altitudes where there is just there's just less air. Yes, the air is thinner, it's harder and harder to generate lift, but okay, that's how much thinner the atmosphere gets as you extend up off of the surface of the Earth. What out when you go even beyond that? Well, I came across some sort of quick and dirty estimates by a radio astronomer named Alistair Gunn doing a short Q and A for the BBC, And note that the following

are approximate. But what gun says is that roughly within the Solar system uh space between the planets contains an average of about five atoms per cubic centimeter. So that's very low density, but there still is gas out there, it's just extremely dispersed in interstellar space, the space between Solar systems in our galaxy, so like where you know where the voyager probes are eventually headed to or where

Mumua came from. That interstellar space has about one atom per cubic centimeter according to gun here, and then in intergalactic space, the space between galaxies, uh, the density is about a hundred times less than that. It gets pretty lonely out there, right, But still there are not no particles. They just get farther and farther apart on average. So the reason space is so empty is of course gravity.

Objects with mass attract one another, so mass tends to clump together over time, creating this varied terrain of cosmic density, with very high density say in the middle of a star, and still still lower density around that star and around the planets around that star, and then lower density in between the stars, and then lower density in between the galaxies and so forth. But it wasn't always this way.

In the early history of the universe, matter was dispersed far more evenly, and you could think of the early universe in a way as a kind of well in a in a strange way, almost kind of like an ocean. I guess it wasn't liquid, but like an ocean or a cloud or something where uh, there were there were more uniform distributions. But then as space expanded that more

varied terrain that we know today influenced by gravity emerged. Yea, So we had the accretion of these various cosmic bodies of different sizes, and then the resulting sort of shrinkage between these accretions. So in a weird way, you could argue that Aristotle is kind of technically vindicated in that there probably are no large scale, long term areas of perfectly empty space in the universe. But I think that in the normal way of understanding Aristotle, he was wrong.

You can create a volume of functional vacuum, but it's not a perfect vacuum. Yeah, and it sounds like you can also do a fair amount of arguing over the size of said vacuum. Yeah. This was making me wonder, like, what what is the average density of the universe overall? Um? And so I was looking around at that I did find a NASA page on this. This is according to research I think carried out by the by w MAP, by the Wilkinson Microwave and Isotropy probe that was looking

at fluctuation in the cosmic microwave background. And in uh in a write up on that research by NASA that they say, quote w Map determined that the universe is flat, from which he follows that the mean energy density in the universe is equal to the critical density within a zero point five percent margin of error. This is equivalent to a mass density of because as an aside, ultimately mass and energy can be exchanged for one another. They are with you know, mass is just a huge amount

of energy um. Coming back to the quote, this is equivalent to a mass density of nine point nine times tend to the negative thirty grams per cubic centimeter. But the density of normal matter is not even that high because most of the energy density in the universe is not normal matter. It's dark matter or dark energy. So maybe normal it is not even the right word, because the kind of matter we're talking about that we're familiar

with is the minority of stuff. Less than five percent of the stuff in the universe is actually made of atoms. So the the the quote actual energy density of atoms is equivalent to roughly one proton per four cubic meters. So you can imagine kind of a like a large palette box and that's like one proton in there, and that's the the average density of the universe. Yes, so if we were to like redistribute it, that's how it would play out. I think we should redistribute it get

a fresh start on this thing. Now. These numbers are admittedly, um, maybe maybe a little bit challenging to sort of picture in your head all the time. But I do like that we're dealing with with with hard numbers. Here, we're doing with dealing with objective numbers related to the vacuum and the void. Uh, something we don't always have in this particular journey. Uh. Sometimes we're dealing with very very

subjective qualities. Oh, you mean, like Aristotle's argument that you couldn't have empty space because if it not be by d it could not exist. Yeah, or certainly getting into some of the philosophical uh ends of the spectrum where we're dealing with what's the difference between uh, emptiness and nothingness,

what's the difference between eternity and nothing? Um, it can it can get a little lucy goosey, well, the difference between I'm gonna defend exploring the difference between emptiness and nothingness. I think that is an interesting distinction, but one that I'm not sure science has has all the answers on. Yeah, I mean a lot of it does come down to the subjective experience. I was talking with my wife before I came in here, and she brought up the example

of isolation tanks. Isolation tanks being a situation where on one level, you have certainly limited your space. You are isolated or within a tank. You're floating within a tank, uh, and therefore you're cutting off how much of like the the outside world you are in. But then there's also

something to the experience UH that is boundary breaking. You know, floating in this salt um bath that is the same temperature as your body uh serves to sort of break down the division between where you stop and the rest of the world begins. So, yeah, there are plenty of cases like you don't have to have an isolation tank to engage in that kind of uh boundary dispute. You know.

I think it's interesting that people often seek uh, maybe not isolation tanks exactly, but isolation from stimuli specifically in order to be creative. Is and that kind of strange that almost implies that they think a principle of psychological horror vakay is going to come into effect, right that if you rob yourself of the normal overwhelming stimuli of everyday existence, you will get your like you will team

with ideas. Yeah, but it is one of these things too where it's like a lot of times you're just you're just changing out one high stimuli environment for another. Uh. And maybe it's just a new one, a novel. And like when you go to the beach and you walk on the beach, Yeah, it's a different experience than being you know, stuck in a city or in a library or in your own house. But I mean that there's a lot going on at the beach. You know, there's crashing waves and expanses of sand and birds and all

sorts of little shells to look at. Likewise, of course, so I'll walk through the woods. Is just I mean, we've we've talked about this before on the podcast, Like your your senses are are able to fully engage in the environment for which they have evolved, uh, taking in all these details and in changing details in the world around you. Oh yeah, that does relate to these theories about how nature tends to engage our attention in a

different way than than built environments do. And that essentially that it uh, I've forgotten all the details of exactly what that theory is, but that it UH that nature can basically be absorbing to the attention but essentially not stress inducing. I think, yeah. And of course this is not even getting into social isolation cutting yourself off from

UM wanted and unwanted UH social connections. UH. Certainly there's a lot to be said for cutting yourself off from the UH connection to one smart device and the internet and so forth. Thank thank Finally, before we move on from this, I was wondering, like, what are the superlatives in terms of vacuums created by humans in the laboratory or or with the aid of technology. What's the lowest

pressure humans can achieve. I'm not sure what the answer is in terms of the lowest pressure overall, but I definitely came across the contender and it is certainly one of the most impressive artificial vacuum systems ever created by humans, if not the lowest pressure. And it's actually the large Head round collider at the way it's largest particle accelerator, which is operated by the by the Ropean Organization for Nuclear Research or CERN. I believe it is still the

largest vacuum system in operation in the world. It was certainly at the time it was put together, and I can't think of what would be larger than it. But it has more than a hundred kilometers of piping held in a state of vacuum for various purposes. There has to be ultra high vacuum piping for the actual particle beams to travel through so that like the accelerated particles don't collide with gas molecules and ruin the experiments. And I'm not sure what would happen if they did collide.

Maybe it could be worse than ruining experiments. Certainly wouldn't be good. You don't want it. But there are also advanced vacuum systems used to like insulate other elements of the collider, such as the magnets or the helium distribution line. So a lot a lot of evacuated space going on at at the LHC facility, and it's at extremely low density. They compare various vacuums that they create to the density of interstellar space. So that is horror vakay in in physics.

But one thing I've been wanting to come back to is the fear of emptiness or the fear of empty spaces as as an actual literal fear that humans feel, the kind of uneasiness that one experiences in a depopulated space. Yeah, this topic of chinophobia, um, and some and some other related terms. I figured a good place to start on

all of this might be to return to cinema. We talked a little bit about cinema earlier in this journey, and in fact, we talked about the ninety seven Dario Argento horror classic Suspiria, and there's a there's a scene in that film that instantly came to mind when I was thinking about this fear, this horror associated with depopulated spaces.

Like you're saying, uh, and if you've seen Suspiria the original, um, although I really like the remake as well, and I don't think they recreated this scene in the remake, but I could be wrong. Uh. This scene involves a blind man walking through an open, unoccupied city plaza at night. There are no other human beings in sight. The environment is is pretty well illuminated, though there's still some deep

pockets of shadow. There's a growing sense of threat and terror, and eventually, and I think we get some very wide shots here too, to really take in all that space. And then as the tension builds, the dog begins to bark and in a in a nasty twist, because again this is a gilt film and they they're off a nasty uh. The dog turns on the blind man and kills him. But the way the scene builds up to

that moment takes just full advantage of this very open space. Uh. This there this feeling that there's just something wrong in the openness of all of this, that there's just just this one individual and his dog out here, and something

terrible is about to happen. I think this scene is a fantastic example, especially because of how different it is than than more of uh, most of Suspiria and most of other h you know, Italian horror films or Jealo films, which we noted in the first episode in the series are uh. They are often recognized for being especially visually busy. You know, they have that artistic sense of horror vakoy as in you you sense a desire to fill in all emptier uniform spaces with detail and richness and stuff.

You know, they're full of patterns and so I think the scene of you know, the man who is unfortunately cursed by the witches and then this this attack happens on him. It gets especially scary because it's so unlike the rest of the movie, having all this emptiness and blank space in the night. But I was thinking about this and about how the horror genre in particular tends to favor blank, vacant, empty locations in multiple ways. Uh So, one way is that they tend to favor settings that

are like literally emptied in the narrative sense. They are literally emptied of human activity or neglected by humans in some way. So think of how much horror loves like abandoned or empty buildings and settlements. Maybe the first idea that comes to my mind is Dracula's Castle, which is interesting because it is a castle that has no servants bustling about, no courtiers, uh just empty halls and chambers, and then the solitary figure of Dracula himself as the host.

It's kind of like a like a Wear's waldo, except there's just one guy there on the page and he and he's really staring at your neck. Oh man, that would be a great twist center where's wild a book Where's Dracula, And each each page is a massive level of Dracula's castle and there's just Dracula. There's nothing there.

It's just hum There are no other Waldos. By the way, this reminds me of one of my favorite scenes in the movie Shadow of the Vampire from the year two thousand, which stars It's a sort of a horror comedy about the making of the movie nos Ferrato, but it says that Max Shrek, the actor who plays nos Ferrato in the movie played by Willem Dafoe in this movie, was actually a vampire. That is what it assumes, and uh,

it's kind of a great premise. And there's a moment where they ask, uh, the character who is in this telling a real vampire if he read the novel Dracula. He says yes. He says the novel made him sad, and they said why and he says, because Dracula had no servants. I forgot about that part. That's good, but

it is kind of sad, isn't it. Like the when when Harker in the novel realizes that like it was the count himself who had to set out the meal for him, and so forth, there's something kind of uh not like not like I want vampires to have servants, but I don't know, there's something kind of lonely and uneasy about it. And I think it has a lot to do with the fact that it's in a castle. It's in this big space meant to be occupied by

many people, but he's the only one there. I mean, I guess later we find out are some other you know, ghoul type creatures, but at first it's just empty except for him. But think of other movies with just abandoned locations, ghost towns, abandoned settlements, you know, empty empty streets and

other places at night and so forth. Uh, Rob, I'm not sure if you've noticed the same thing, but it strikes me that horror movies, especially favor locations that are not just empty as a matter of course, like you'd expect them to be empty, but locations that are empty in contrast to how we usually see them. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

This has often played a great effect and various ghost towns and your westerns and of course depopulated cities like It's it's not enough to just replace the you know, you get into like post apocalyptic scenarios where it's like destroyed cities and bodies and so forth. And yes, zombies, um, but that doesn't mean you're necessarily going for this, uh this total feeling of emptiness. Uh, this this sense that that all the activity in presence of the was there

previously is just gone. But one example that does come to nine, and this is a zombie film, but twenty eight days later, of course, that's all those wonderful shots of what depopulated London and our our our character walking around there and sort of experiencing just the overwhelming emptiness of the city. I think that's a great example. It's

incredibly unnerving that opening. Uh So you could contrast that with like say a movie with scenes in a desert or a forest wilderness, which might be empty of human activity, but we would expect them to be empty of human activity. And in cases where movies focus on that, in the horror genre, at least, the horror usually comes from when you find something or someone, or suspect the presence of

something or someone that you wouldn't usually expect to encounter there. Instead, locations that I think of his most common to horror movies are like empty versions of places you would usually expect to be full. So not just cities like at the beginning of twenty days Later, but I think of empty hospitals at the night shift, empty churches and cathedrals, whereas the congregation, empty school buildings after hours, empty empty castles. Like I said at the beginning, you know what happened

to the crew of the event horizon? Why is this spaceship empty? Uh So, I think empty locations like this lend themselves well to horror for multiple reasons. One is a kind of just like literal understanding of danger in the world. Like you know, there's an uneasiness that comes from a location being empty, because it sort of means like you're on your own against whatever might threaten you.

But if for the location is full of people, you might be able to get help from the werewolf if it's going to come at you, like people usually feel safer in numbers for totally good and logical reasons. You know two examples that come to mind. They're very related because they both involved the same sort of location. I think both of these examples kind of maybe you know, bend this line a little bit and and and blurred the distinction between uh emptiness being invigorating and empowering and

it being terrifying. They both take place in shopping malls, and of course thinking about Donna the Dead from George Romero and Shopping Mall both films in which our characters find themselves in a depopulated mall shopping mall environment and uh, and eventually they're gonna have to deal with of course zombies in one film, and well and also um like evil bikers in one film, but then in the other

film they're gonna have to deal with killer robots. And in both of these there's kind of like this um, I don't know, this kind of I guess capitalist rebellion um energy to them where it's like this this this place that contained me through commerce and also just the social environment of the mall. Now those constraints are not there, and I can just go into any any store in

the mall and steal things. And then but then on the other hand, yes, it's like all the things that made this a normal place, that made this a you know, cathedral of of American culture during the nineteen eighties or what have you. Uh, that's gone as well. There's something

unholy about the environment that's great observation. Yeah, about the malls in these movies, it's like the the fact that we see them with all of the people taken out of them, not shopping anymore, just automatically invites questions, kind of critical questions about what this place was for in the first place and what it meant. And of course, yeah, it invites that uneasy feeling, and I think that goes

to the next thing. So there was the thing I already said about empty locations are in a very literal sense, they're scarier just because like their safety and numbers. But but empty locations and abandoned the locations I think are also good fodder for horror on a conceptual level because in some cases they invite you to wonder why the place is empty, like what happened here? Where did the

people go? Or as you just said, they invite you to sort of look upon the purpose of the place with a newly critical eye, like when when people are not doing the things they're normally doing in this place,

what is this place actually for? Yeah, we just go some of that in our and you alluded to this a little bit already, But the episodes that we did about Christmas ghost stories from Northern Europe to deal with this whole question like what is a church if it is midnight and no one is there, Like is it still a church? And if it is still a church, what what does that mean? Is it still sacred or just the sacredness come from the uh, you know, the

congregation and the acts they do inside it. And so could the same building the church be used for unholy rites?

Thank thank, thank, But finally, I think there are also conceptual suggestions, like a place that is empty in contrast to the expectation that it should be full, like all of these depopulated places we've been talking about that has long been associated with death, right like you would think under normal old ideas like humans have left this formerly inhabited place, like a like a soul leaving a body.

But in addition to all these more literal concerns, I think horror films in particular, but other genres as well, often use blank space also known as negative space, in the frame of of the film as a visual marker

to create uneasiness. So this is less literal about like what is threatening the characters, and more just kind of the feelings that we get from how a movie looks I don't know how much of this is a natural psychological expectation that humans have and how much is just sort of a like a learned convention and emergent convention of filmmaking that we have all learned implicitly from watching movies. But I think the baseline fact is that when we see negative space in a movie, we somewhat expect it

to become filled. There's empty space on the screen. We expect something to come to occupy that space, and of course, once you have expectation, you have the ability to create tension, and by denying the fulfillment of that expectation, like you know, like a character peers out into the darkness and it's uniform darkness, not not filled in with detail, there's no detail, or they look into an empty room with nothing in it,

or some other negative space. We expect something to happen, something to fill that space, sort to come into view, and if it doesn't, that is unresolved tension and uneasiness and the sort of the prime example, like one of the core feelings that is evoked by weird fiction and cinema. Yeah, yeah, And I think a great recent example of all this would be Jordan Peel's Note that came out just last year. I'm not gonna do any spoilers for it, because I

don't think you've seen it yet, have you. I still haven't, no, and I know a lot of listeners haven't, So I'm not gonna spoil it. But I will say that there are a lot of shots that established the sky as the domain of some manner of inhuman threat and uh. And then below beneath the sky you have the this wonderful California desert setting as well, so it's very geographically open. But then you have this open sky, you also have some some wonderful clouds at play, both during the daytime

sequences in the nighttime sequences. But still it does this fabulous job of establishing um a cloudy or even open skies being possibly a threat. And I found when I watched it in the theater when I left the theater, when I left the dark theater and went out into the day, because it was Mattenee that I attended, Uh, instantly, I kind of felt in danger. I kind of felt some of the danger from the film still, like residually coursing through my body to where I was like, let's

go ahead, and get to the car. I don't want to. I don't feel great walking across this this wide open parking lot beneath this uh this scary sky. Oh boy. Well, I will admit that when I come out of a mattenee, I often feel uneasy. Uh, No matter what the movie was, there's just something weird about coming out of a dark ended movie theater and it's still light outside. Yeah, it's

like other worlds, It's what's what's going on? Yeah, it kind of reminds me of that feeling like when you take too long of a nap in the middle of the day. It's like, yeah, it's disorienting. You've you've been in a cave watching a cinema, and then then you go out into the real world. Now, in thinking about how Note made me temporarily feel about open skies, I did find it interesting to come across various mentions of a supposed phobia online dubbed cassadastrophobia, which is described as

a fear of essentially falling up into the sky. M Now, I I couldn't find any academic discussion of this alleged phobia, and I'm not doubting anyone's experiences around it because for starters, there's plenty of room for anxiety and paranoia to creep up in one's experience of reality. Um. It may simply

just be newly defined and understudied UM. But to whatever extent it's an actual phobia, it would seem to be kind of a subset of this idea of quenophobia pronounced fear of of the open You know, a feeling that this open sky might either swallow you up or somehow gravity is going to fail and you'll float up into it. That is an interesting fear because it doesn't correspond to anything that I can think of that ever happens in reality.

And it's very specific. Yeah, And it's interesting because I can kind of relate to these overwhelming feelings of viewing either a clear blue sky in the day or certainly a sprawling star escape in a rural environment where you're free of light pollution and cloud cover and everything's really expansive.

Um and and it. But it's also it's weird because these are both This is that can be very inspiring and beautiful but can maybe reach the point of being overwhelming and and maybe it ends up having this effect where you think about what would happen if I like, what if I just fell up into it? And it doesn't make any sense. Nobody's like, this is not going to happen. You have, you have a number of other concerns if gravity stops working. Besides, you know where you're

gonna float to. But um, but yeah, I can. I can sort of look back on times in my life where I've been looking up at like a big, clear blue sky or some sort of star escape and feeling this, especially with the blue sky. I think there are times where I looked up at the star escape and I was maybe a little afraid of aliens more than I was afraid of just falling up into the blue Were you afraid of aliens because you watched Unsolved Mysteries and they had the scary Yes. As a child, I was.

I was afraid of it, afraid of aliens because there was no counter narrative. I think of discusses on the show before you would just encounter this said this episode or episodes of Unsolved Mysteries and they're like, Yep, there might be aliens out there. It seems like there's good evidence for it. I don't know, And you know, you didn't have Carl Sagan coming on afterwards and explaining all the reasons why you shouldn't be worried. That would be hilarious.

Each episode ends with like a formal debate between Robert Stack and Carl say, um, yeah, that so. But with the with the blue, It's hard to say. It's just at times I felt kind of an unnerving sense when

there was like this really big blue sky. I don't know, I'll get back to this, but but it also I went on a tangent here where I was reminded of something that Geraldine Pinch discusses in her book Egyptian Mythology about how the cloudless skies above ancient Egypt would have provided ready viewing of the stars and planets, thus instilling a great interest in the movement of the heavens in

Egyptian mythology. And uh this I wasn't able to find a satisfying answer on this, but I mean, this definitely seems to be the case with the ancient Egyptians. But the ancient Egyptians were not the only people to find the sky very interesting. They weren't the only ones to have ah an advanced astronomy. I mean, you look at various examples from the ancient world, the Babylonians, the Greeks,

uh India, China, Persia, the Mayans. They all had robust astronomical systems, and there there are disciplines that look into this sort of question, like how did the perception of the sky and the understanding of the cosmos and the movements of the stars. More specifically, like how did this affect a given civilization and their beliefs and their views.

You have the disciplines of arco astronomy and ethno astrology, and there's a lot of interesting work out there concerning, say, for an example, certain architectural traditions and to what extent they were created with astronomy and astronomical data in mind. Oh yeah, I see, like buildings that may or may not have been intended to align with the stars in

a certain way. Yeah, And so what I guess I was curious about was, Okay, does this mean that are you going to have certain civilizations located in regions or with high population density and regions that had maybe more understructed views of the night sky with a lean towards a more robust astronomical culture or something. Um I didn't

encounter much to really back that up. You know, there there wasn't much that I was encountering that said that there's any kind of like astrophilic or astrophobic division between cultures or anything not that I could tell. If it's out there and I missed it, and you know about it,

listeners right in and let me know. But more often you seem to see this mix related to astronomical traditions that where a culture civilization realizes that okay, you know that the trackable movement of the sun and the stars is linked to various cycles of life, the passage of time, the seasons, navigation, and then you also have purely supernatural concepts such as omens and portents and the looking to the stars to try and divine the future, and and

looking for yet individual data data about the individual experience UH in the heavens, alongside broader information about UH like

how life works in the long term on Earth. So within a given astronomical culture, there might be a number of important but kind of mone aim considerations about the sky, alongside lofty or religious cosmological ideas and negative superstitions concerning certain anomalies such as say, eclipses, which we've discussed in the show before, as well as things that certain lunar phases and and other things that might in some cases might be out of the ordinary or somehow novel, but

being anomalies, these would probably not be things where the source of the anxiety is anything you could identify as like fear of the openness of the sky, right right, Yeah, it's more you read about, you know, some of these eclipse myths and all there are fear based um interpretations of them and and and myths involving you know, some

sort of monster threatening reality and so forth. But then on the other side, you have even though they may seem like strange anomalies out of nowhere to some observers, and perhaps it's sometimes you're still gonna have astronomy get on top of that. As we discussed in those those episodes we did on eclipse myths, and uh, you know, people begin to realize, okay, these things are trackable and we can tell when they will occur or we can

predict them. Thank thank thank Now, within the context of horror Um, this idea of fearing the sky, fearing big open places um, it does line up not only thematically but specifically with the twentieth century writings of HP love Draft.

I was looking around, and you know, I don't think I don't remember reading this story, but there's story titled The Other Gods, and there's this bit in it where the character who's I'm sure clearly um going mad thinking about, you know, the some sort of monstrous reality all around him, uh, exclaims the other gods, the other gods, the gods of the outer hells that guard the feeble gods of Earth. Look away, go back, do not see, do not see the vengeance of the infinite to this is that cursed,

that damnable pit, merciful gods of Earth. I am falling into the sky. Ah. Yeah, Well, that kind of fear does seem to fit into the I mean, probably not just Lovecraft, but you could say the broader convention of of cosmic horror, which uh, you know, is a horror that that has a lot to do not just with like specific threats to the individual characters, but a kind of terror at the idea of the insignificance of humankind when compared to some kind of greater force or greater

meaninglessness in the in the cosmos as a whole. And one way you could really imagine that that sort of absurdity or meaninglessness being highlighted is just like, I don't know, capricious violations of the laws of physics. Suddenly you fall up instead of down. Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's a there's

a lot of that in the weird fiction world. Um. And a lot of this is is described as being in line with the literary philosophy of cosmicism, which is this idea that, yeah, though the universe is just teeming with alien threats, monster gods from space, but also it's related to this fear regarding humanity seemingly inconsequential place in

a vast and alien universe. And I think this is often you know, you often see this emerging in a context of of of our increasing scientific understanding of of who we are and what the planet is and uh, you know, and getting away from these older ideas about and also religious ideas about the importance of earth, the importance of humanity. Uh, and then what are you left with? Um,

or at least what are you left with? And maybe in your darker moments or in your your moments of doubt, right, I mean, it's sort of the antisocial side of the Copernican principle. Yeah, so like, yeah, I don't think the compernic in principle, like the fact that you should not assume that you are looking at the universe from a privileged place or that you are the center of the universe. Instead, should um assume you are looking at the universe from

an average place within the universe. And of course that goes along with our discovery of uh, you know, the Earth not being the center of the solar system and so forth. Uh. Yeah, I think that's just a fact of life, and that is a good way to look at the universe. One need not feel despairing about it. But if one chooses to feel despairing about that realization, you kind of end up in the cosmic horror area. Yeah.

And and in the case of love Craft in particular, and perhaps related authors as well, you're not just dealing with this fear of cosmic insignificance either. Uh. You know, you also have to throw in there a healthy dose of misanthropy, of xenophobia and so forth. So uh, put that all in the stew together, and um, yeah, a lot of horror can can emerge. But also, yeah, this

this feeling that maybe nothing matters. But a lot of this I think this, this thinking about the sky and this feeling about the perhaps fears of falling into the sky, And maybe they're not like, you know, a literal fear like oh I better hold onto the grass, but it's this sort of overwhelming sense of of the vast. I think a lot of it does come back to what we discussed earlier, this connection between UM, the infinite and the finite, between how this is of great expanse can

affect us. So to one line of thinking, clear of the blue sky might be relaxing and a brilliant star escape inspiring, but to others this could certainly be overpowering, perhaps bringing out feelings of vulnerability and insignificance. Yes, certainly,

And this comes back to UM. You know something we talked about a couple of episodes ago about like the difference in art styles that people use to h to create sacred or RESTful or contemplative spaces in UH in different environments, and how it's not clear that there's always a correlation in this direction, but it's possible that you could have trends where people who spend more of their time in a kind of like a busy environment might be more inclined to have their sacred or RESTful or

contemplative spaces decorated in a minimalist way that has more blankness, more uniformity of color, and things like that, whereas people who live in uh in more pastoral environments might be more attracted to sacred, RESTful, or or contemplative spaces that are full of rich detail. And the example was Tibetan art. Yeah. Yeah,

so I think I think all that applies here as well. Again, this this becomes so subjective depending on where one's head is and um, and you know what you're thinking about, and then suddenly you encounter, say a wide open space or an enclosed space, and then how does that affect how you're feeling? Now? I was looking around for other other sources commenting on some of this, and I did

find a very interesting paper by Dr Francisco Matta. The papers all they a phenomenological investigation of the presence thing of space, and this was, Uh, this is an interesting paper. You can find it online, um and uh and read it for free of an interest here, But I just want to read one quote from it that kind of

gets down to what we're talking about here quote. However, this search for freedom or empowerment can be frightening whenever one is searching for what we used to call a horizontality and puts oneself in situations in which one may perceive larger volumes of space, one runs the risk of losing sight of the limits of such a volume, in

which case one will likely feel keenophobic. One may have this fearful experience since one has no anchors of reference, and therefore one is unable to become aware of any volume of space. For example, when out at c departing from the coastline and heading farther and farther into the ocean, one comes to be in the midst of a vast extension of limitless water. Canophobia is in fact the opposite of being placed, the being at home that comes with

top ophilia. So that's interesting. I like that explanation a lot, This feeling of that you could be hit with that. Again, this is highly subjective, but you encounter this vast expands of ocean or sky or desert, and you you loose side of the limits, and you might think, well, you know, I have no place here, I have I have no belonging here. This is the overwhelming scope of the world kind of unhinges me from that, like that spatial sense

of belonging. Alright, looks like we've gone the limit here. We're we're late for the sky, so we're gonna go ahead and close it out. But we'd love to hear from everyone out there if you have thoughts and reflections on all of this. I'd especially love to hear from anyone out there who has had a similar or conflicting reaction to say, a very open blue sky or a very open um starvista at night. Uh be interesting to

continue to discuss this on our listener mail episodes. Our listener Mail episodes of course published on Mondays in the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed Our Core Science episodes are on Tuesdays and Thursdays, short form Monster Fact on Wednesdays, and then on Fridays, we set aside most serious concerns and just talk about a strange film on Weird House Cinema. Huge thanks to our audio producer J J. Pauseway.

If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at Stuff to Blow Your Mind dot com Stuff to Blow your Mind. It's production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts for my heart Radio with the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows. It stored propa