The Beautiful Horror of Deep Space

Reading Laika's Wikipedia article has ruined me. "Before the launch one of the mission scientists took Laika home to play with his children. In a book chronicling the story of Soviet space medicine, Vladimir Yazdovsky wrote, 'Laika was quiet and charming ... I wanted to do something nice for her: She had so little time left to live.'" "One of the technicians preparing the capsule before final liftoff: 'After placing Laika in the container and before closing the hatch, we kissed her nose and wished her bon voyage, knowing that she would not survive the flight.'" "In 1998, after the collapse of the Soviet regime, Oleg Gazenko, one of the scientists responsible for sending Laika into space, expressed regret for allowing her to die: 'Work with animals is a source of suffering to all of us. We treat them like babies who cannot speak. The more time passes, the more I'm sorry about it. We shouldn't have done it ... We did not learn enough from this mission to justify the death of the dog.'"

Deep Sea and Deep Space are truly sisters in how they frighten us in much of the same ways: dark, cold, quiet, vast and void, humans floating almost helplessly when placed in them. Truly twins separated from birth.

The way my heart sunk into my stomach when you told the story of the Laika... I just pictured myself in her position, frightened confused... betrayed.... she looked soo excited. the poor thing could never imagine in centuries of evolution what was going to happen to her. With no way to conceptualize what was happening, all that remained was primal fear. This is going to keep me up. All that said, your growth as a creator on this platform is just inspiring to watch. You are an incredible storyteller.

The most terrifying aspect of space is how deafeningly silent it is, despite all the mind boggling stuff going on out there.

19:18 Fun fact: Jules Verne's calculations for reaching the Moon were actually pretty accurate, which surprised many NASA scientists.

"What scares us about space?" You and Kurtzgesagt endlessly making nightmarefuel essays does.

"The trajectory of this ship is unchanging. I'm still going to water the plants." I'm going to cry.

Ultron: "They're doomed." Vision: "Yes. But a thing isn't beautiful because it lasts."

The story of Lyka is so heartbreaking. Every single clip or picture of her, she looked SO happy to be involved.... 😢😢😢

I don’t know why, but even though No Man’s Sky is by no means a scary game, just looking out into the abyss, it always gives me chills.

Why do people have cosmophobia ,Let cosmos get married smh

The idea of being confronted with the unknown of an endless universe and feeling so insignificant you become desperate to hang onto memories of people, places, or things in your life that gave you meaning and making the most of a seemingly meaningless existence while you can knowing it's all in vain never fails to make me cry. The concept has so much potential for angst, tragedy, and hope.

Dude. Your writing in this episode was phenomenal.

For some reason, I've never been scared by the vastness of space. It's big, it's vast, and to me it's inviting. Anything could be out there, and that is amazing to me.

Maybe I'm weird but I kind of love how small and impermanent everything is. It feels like a good poem, or a book where each tiny detail is for beauty rather than some greater real world purpose.

Dude, what you said at 5:13 was the most beautiful line ive ever heard from any video essay, ever. period.

After you brought up outer wilds, i had to think about the countless hours i spent playing No Man's Sky with my family. We play on a shared save file that is four years old, since this game has true multiplayer. In those four years, we accomplished a lot. Our "home" bases are in the 239th Galaxy, but we have countless others, discovered thousands of star systems. But when i zoom out of the galaxy map and see the tiny pixels which are our clusters, not even the individual systems, it also shows how little we accomplished. Combined ~3000 hours of four people reduced to maybe 10 tiny pixels on a 4K screen. No one will ever find our large bases we built. No one will ever find our amazing rare paradise planets. No one will ever find our resource hotspots. Despite them all being saved on a giant server with many people. I don't know if there ever was another player traveling nearby and almost made contact with us. In those four years, there were only two instances of a stranger visiting our base and they only did after seeing them on the galactic teleporter of the anomaly and randomly chose them. It's a 1 in a Billion chance.

GOD laika’s story is just so upsetting

23:18 "on a personal level; things that have been lost still matter" god. that hit me so deeply, especially seeing that video of the precious dog Laika. she was so sweet and so trusting. she didn't deserve our cruelty. this is such a powerful statement for so many aspects of life, on humanity, on why we should fight alongside people who experience brutality and genocide, like Palestine, Congo, Sudan, Hawai'i, Turtle Island, Haiti.. not a single human being deserves to go through what they all have, what we all have. what has lost still matters. all these lives lost still matter. all the lives fighting for survival and life and joy still matter. and we should fight for it.

I often fantasize about drifting through space, alone. I see it as beautiful and peaceful. Just how expansive it is, and the entire mystery of it. I think it's comforting knowing that death is something everything in the universe shares, even non-organic objects. People die, animals die, microbes die, planets die, stars die, and eventually the universe will too. No one is here forever, and even the human race isn't here forever. I feel like a lot of people don't grasp the concept, and vision of how small we really are. I think Adventure Time plays a big part in how comfortable I feel about the expansiveness, and mortality of the universe. In the show they portrayed it in a very beautiful but real way.