[WARNING! In this video I give you a
lot of reasons to be scared of space! If you are already scared of space,
this might not be the video for you! If you aren't scared of space, this video
might change that! This fully didn't occur to me when I scripted it because I love space,
but Blue told me we needed a content warning, which is a pretty good sign that we
definitely needed a content warning. So be warned: this video about how space is
scary might convince you that space… is scary.] Experts around the world agree that
humans… look up sometimes. In fact, looking up is one of our species's favorite
hobbies, and has been highly popular for as long as we've had suitably flexible spines and
apex predators that know how to climb. But "up" is more than just a fun direction tigers sometimes
come out of: "up" is also where space is. Space is also in every other direction, but you can
forgive an early human for not guessing that. And space is very exciting from a worldbuilding
standpoint! Our built-in sleep schedule aligns with the day-night cycle defined by the sun rising
and setting every basically-24 hours, so the sky is kind of foundational to some pretty important
human stuff. The sun definitely commands the most attention on a day-to-day basis, but the night
sky presents intrigue and mystery. A nearly-static pattern of sparkling lights that ever-so-slightly
shifts every night, but the pattern of the stars always matches the season and changes at the same
constant rate as the year's weather patterns. The sky always looks the same when it's cold and it
always looks the same when it's hot and it always looks the same when the flowers come back.
Clearly, it has to mean something. What are those lights? Are they the campfires of our ancestors?
The chariots of the gods? Memorials to long-dead heroes and monsters? Why do some of them move
around sometimes? That's not even touching on the moon! Good grief, how do we get anything
done around here? There's so many questions! Of course, questions beget investigation and
investigation eventually produces answers. The stars change at the same rate as the yearly
seasons because they're affected by the same thing - the earth's position relative to the sun. As
the earth orbits the sun, our axial tilt exposes us to a fluctuating amount of sunlight while
also pointing us at a different section of sky every night. Those extra-bright wandering stars
were actually other planets that also orbited the sun - thought there was, of course, some debate
over this, as the idea that the known universe orbited the sun instead of the earth called into
question the seemingly ironclad thesis that the earth was the de facto center of the universe and
the most important thing around. I mean, it had to be. It's where we live! This position got less and
less defensible as it became clear that the stars were not sparkly mica chips adorning the inside
of a massive sphere with us at the center, but, in fact, more suns, just as big and sometimes bigger
than our own shiny number and incomprehensibly far away. With each new revelation, the known universe
got more and more vast, and earth's place in that universe started to look a lot less centralized
and a lot more teeny-weeny. But this was also exciting. If space was a place rather than a
pretty skybox or a crystal sphere or something, then we could go there. We could explore. And
who knew what we would find? Maybe more people, just like us! Or excitingly hostile worlds to
explore, ray-gun in hand! If every star was a sun, who knew how many earths could be out there? Who
else had been out there? What had they seen? What had they built? Why hadn't they called us?
But as the picture got clearer, it became increasingly obvious that space wasn't a thriving
ecosystem of exciting aliens, humanoid or otherwise. It was airless, irradiated, and - most
dishearteningly - everything was really, really far away. Far from hopping in your high-tech
personal spaceship with your bubble helmet and form-fitting spacesuit and jetting off to mars
to hang out with their exotic martian queen, space travel was slow, claustrophobic, physically
and mentally taxing… and unrewarding. Space was… quiet. Everywhere that looked exciting was much
too far away to reach in a human lifetime, or even ten human lifetimes, and the things that made
them exciting usually also made them incredibly hostile to human survival. And not just hostile
- incomprehensible. There were things in space that were so much bigger than the entire planet
earth that the laws of physics that affected them were things we'd never seen before because
they don't happen on the scale we experience anywhere on this planet. Black holes, where the
gravity is so strong that their escape velocity is higher than the speed of light, had been theorized
to exist since people first figured out that there was a speed of light, but "guessing they existed"
was not the same thing as seeing the damn things bending spacetime around them. And the concept of
radiation only really started to be understood in, like, 1900, which is pretty rough considering
stars are radioactive nuclear furnaces and we were trying to get all up close and personal with
them while we'd barely just figured out that they could turn our DNA inside out. We started to
realize that space was so enormously vast and so far outside the scale of anything we were
familiar with we could barely even understand what we were dealing with out there, and a lot of
what we were dealing with was turning out to be startlingly good at killing us. It was impossibly
enormous, terrifyingly deadly… and eerily silent. Sci fi writers busily got started on imagining
warp drives and hyperspace and stargates that'd let their fictional space explorers bypass that
tedious speed-of-light thing and actually get somewhere before dying of old age, but on the
flip side, a new trend began to emerge in fiction: space… was really, really creepy. Not just
creepy - existentially disturbing. It hit that perfect balance of claustrophobia
and agoraphobia - space is so deadly that you can only survive in a shielded,
pressurized, terrifyingly fragile vessel, usually cramped and disorienting, and outside
that vessel is millions of miles of nothing and the nothing really wants you dead. Space,
the final frontier, was absolutely terrifying. Now, for all the reasons we've just discussed,
space makes a great horror setting. In fact, it's almost too good at being a horror setting,
because it's scary on almost every possible level. So when it gets used for horror, the writer
usually needs to narrow down what specific facet of space they'll be exploring for horror.
One of the earliest popular subgenres of space horror was the Alien Invasion. This was a common
anxiety in early sci-fi that has since lost popularity somewhat. Structurally, it was very
simple: space was really big, full of other stars and planets potentially just like ours. WE were
alive, and historically known to indulge in the odd bout of being colonizing bastards, so it was
reasonable to speculate that somewhere out there in the cosmos there could be other colonizing
bastards, with better guns! These stories gave audiences an easy bad guy to unconditionally hate
- a horde of incomprehensible alien creatures descending from the previously inoffensive heavens
to give us the ol' British Navy Special for their own nefarious purposes! Early alien invasion
stories usually featured aliens as a terrifyingly superior foe to be fought in total war, but later
stories featured more subtle invasions by things like bodysnatchers or pod people who could replace
your neighbors with you being none the wiser, and ever-so-coincidentally this happened to be
happening at the same time as the Red Scare. Because it's kind of awkward when the scary
evil aliens are just doing what we did more efficiently, but it's okay when the scary evil
aliens are doing what those jerks over there did. Still, the cut-and-dry alien invasion
story found itself being subverted more and more - some stories instead painted
the alien "invader" as more of a "first contact" situation that humans royally beef by
being all paranoid and tribal about it, suggesting that the reason space seems so quiet is because
all the cool aliens think we're jerks. In other stories the "invasion" is less of a coordinated
attack force and more of a single threat, like a single very dangerous alien or something
like a space plague or really weird meteor. In simple cases these things just kill people, but in
more lovecraftian stories they might be something from so far outside our world's paradigm that just
by its nature it does completely incomprehensible stuff to the people and things around it, and by
the time anyone figures out what it's doing it's already been doing it. This creeping dread at an
alien corruption is more popular nowadays than the invading alien army approach, but they all kind
of embody the same general principle: something alive comes from space - and it's a problem.
But alien invasion stories almost always happen on earth - otherwise they wouldn't really
be invasions. In stories set in space, the horror focus will often draw on Environmental
Isolation. As discussed, being in space is claustrophobic and agoraphobic all at once. Most
horror stories involve a character being trapped and isolated in a bad situation, hence explaining
why they don't just call for help or run away from the monster - and space horror takes that to its
logical conclusion. Why don't they run? Because there's nowhere to go. Why don't they call for
help? Because there's nobody around for millions of miles! And while they're dealing with the scary
space monster they'd better hope the ship doesn't get damaged too badly, because that tiny bubble
of habitable space is very fragile and once the air gets out of it it's a lot more difficult to
put it back in. While horror stories set on earth often end with the cops showing up or the cavalry
arriving to rescue the surviving protagonists, horror stories in space can be rather more
unforgiving. Sometimes the space police show up to help, but sometimes the best the characters
can hope for is putting themself in cryosleep and hoping someone hears their distress call before
they drift into the sun. Space is pretty close to the bottom of the list of "places I'd want
to try fighting a monster." The archetypical example of this is obviously Alien, where
the hero is stuck playing cat and mouse with the unholy offspring of a gimp suit and a
velociraptor and her job would be a lot easier if she wasn't stuck with it with nowhere to go.
But back closer to home, we find an odd cousin of the "space horror" genre that combines it with the
"save the world" plotline to form Something Really Big Is Falling Towards The Planet. This might
sound oddly specific and look a little less like space horror, but it draws from similar anxieties
as the alien invasion. Space is very, very big, and we know there's a lot of stuff out there in
it - it can just be hard to get to that stuff. In fact, we know from our own fossil record
that stuff from space has hit the earth before, and in one noteworthy case did a pretty good
job of wiping out all life on earth. Well, 75%. Still not bad for a giant rock. So space
is really big and it's full of other really big stuff, some of it moving very fast. It's
reasonable to worry that some of that really big stuff might hit us someday. NASA certainly thinks
so, as they keep very careful watch on all the big near-earth objects that would potentially
be a problem if their orbit ever got too cozy with ours. Now before I give anyone nightmares,
this is the kind of problem that NASA spends a lot of time and energy and money focusing on
so they can keep it from becoming a problem, and it is not a problem any of us regular johnnies
need to lie awake at night stressing over. Okay? Cool. But in fiction, giant scary space rocks are
a thrilling and/or melancholic action-driving plot device. The horror of this story format comes
from space and draws on some major stars of the space horror tropes - incomprehensible
vastness, a sense of powerlessness in the face of the void - but rather than playing these
up for active horror, these stories tend to be more melancholy or action-y than standard space
horror. In melancholic settings the story might be more about how the characters cope with the
seemingly inevitable destruction of the world, while in action-y settings they usually have to go
blow up or otherwise defeat the giant space rock before it gets any ideas on upstaging the moon.
Next up, back in actual space, we get stories of the format We Found Something Really Weird. A
constant danger of exploration is the risk of finding stuff we don't understand that turns out
to be much more dangerous than we're prepared for, or that has weird and scary effects we don't know
how to deal with. Creepy artifacts with Bad Vibe auras, things that turn out to be part of alien
reproductive cycles, an ancient space ruin that's totally silent but not as empty as it looks, etc
etc. These things often kick off horror plots by being actively very bad to be around, but they
have varying degrees of individual malevolence - think the spectrum of cursed artifacts. Some of
them are actively hostile, some are just passively radioactive, some aren't actually all that bad
- they just kick off the inciting incident. This variant is very popular in video games, probably
because it's a really good premise for interesting environment design, collectible macguffins, and
enemies for the protagonists to shoot en masse. And just one half-step away from that is Turns
Out Space Itself Is Really Weird. As astronomy and space exploration has been a constant process of
learning new, increasingly unsettling information about what space is and how it works, this
sentiment is grounded in the very real experience of studying the cosmos as a whole. Turns out
stars aren't just points of light, they're suns, just really far away ones! Except for these
stars, which are actually planets. And this one, which is actually a whole galaxy full of
hundreds of billions of stars. And these two, which are actually the same galaxy but there's a
very strong source of gravity between us and it, like a black hole, and the gravitational lensing
is causing the galaxy's image to be distorted from our perspective, because that's a thing that can
happen. Oh, what's a black hole? Glad you asked! See, they used to be called "Dark Stars" when they
were theorized in 1784, but actually they're just objects with such strong gravity that not even
light can escape them and they also might have collapsed into a zero-dimensional singularity that
has functionally no physical properties other than their mass, charge and angular momentum! So how do
we know they're even there? Well, by how much they f*ck up everything around them, of course! See,
with real stuff this unnerving it's no wonder that fiction ratchets it back and just makes
it so space is hell or something. Considering that the history of space discovery has been
one deeply unsettling discovery after another, it's fully reasonable for a writer to speculate
that launching ourselves into space willy-nilly might result in finding some more new and exciting
thing we don't understand that can warp us or kill us in new and fascinating ways, and it's just as
reasonable for them to speculate that space itself might be in some way warped and kill-happy. It's
quite common for writers to specifically explore this concept in the context of wormholes,
warp drives, hyperspace and all the other bits of sci-fi spec fic designed to circumvent
certain inflexible physical laws to enable happy fun-time space adventures without that killjoy
Speed Of Light getting in the way. The idea that bypassing a fundamental law of reality might
have some, to use the technical term, f*cky consequences is pretty popular. Even in settings
where it isn't exactly space, it's common for any kind of transdimensional gateway network or
spooky zero-gravity hell dimension to be at least kinda deeply unnerving to deal with. In stories
like this, passing through a wormhole or switching on a warp drive for the first time can come with
some very unpleasant unintended consequences. This can be comparatively tame, like in Larry Niven's
version of hyperspace travel, where the space outside the ship in transit is complete blank
nothingness, like the observer's blind spot is covering the window at all times, and it's really
creepy - and it can also be blindingly unsubtle, like in Event Horizon, where opening a wormhole
turned out to literally transport the ship to physical actual hell, at which point it very
considerately brought some hell back to share with the class. This can even work in stories
with only space-like settings, like ReBoot, which is set entirely in a computer and thus has
no access to real space, but substitutes in The Web, a spooky zero-gravity chaos dimension that
will degrade and corrupt anyone who goes into it without suitable shielding, probably from all
the popup ads and twitter discourse. In short, when it comes to "space as a horror setting,"
the idea that space itself is the enemy is a very popular concept for pretty self-evident reasons.
Now, as a setting trope, "space horror" doesn't actually dictate much about the plot, but it
does come with a set of standard plothooks that can draw an unwitting protagonist into a
really bad situation. Space-horror protagonists will frequently be roped into the plot because
something out in space went wrong and they've been called in to help or at least investigate to
figure out what went wrong and how they can stop it from going wrong again in the future. Then when
they get there, surprise, turns out the thing that went wrong was one of about a million different
horrible possibilities that are still very much present and threatening and their new goal is to
survive and escape to avoid meeting the same fate as the first guys. Sometimes they're supposed
to be on a rescue mission, but they don't need to bother, it literally never goes well. Best
case scenario the rescue-ee is already dead. Most suspicious scenario, the rescue-ee seems
oddly unscathed. Either way it never works out. As a horror setting, space has one major
advantage over its competitors: scale. The biggest thing about space is that there's so much
space in it. Threats can be planet-sized, empires can span galaxies, threats can have consumed
whole worlds before reaching earth. In contrast, most other horror stories are by necessity
limited in scale, at least when it comes to the horror itself - a slasher film's horror is one
guy, a monster movie's horror is one monster, even a disaster movie generally focuses down on how a
tiny core cast handles one environmental threat, often in a purposefully claustrophobic environment
to highlight how the goal is to escape. The threat might be a globe-spanning zombie plague but the
setpiece will be a cramped hospital, a train, etcetera. The story relies on claustrophobia,
because in order for the threat to be threatening, the heroes have to be trapped with it, and that
in turn implies that the goal of the heroes is to escape. Space, on the other hand, has the
ability to trap the character with open space. It's not that there's nowhere to run - there's
a whole universe out there. It just won't help you. This actually applies even in alien horror
that takes place on earth, because the threat is usually something from the stars that threatens
to make the earth uninhabitable - and even if the threat is smaller-scale, the fact that a nightmare
dropped out of the sky with no warning once means it could easily happen again. Space becomes the
world's biggest source of constant anxiety. It's no longer a mysterious and inviting source of
wanderlust encouraging us to explore a vast and beautiful universe and spread across the stars
- it's a cold, airless, radioactive void just waiting to drop bodysnatchers and viruses and
mutative alien parasites or swallow up our tiny starships and spit them out warped into something
monstrous and unrecognizable, and to make matters worse, it's got us surrounded. It catches us
staring into the void and makes us flinch. Now this is not quite unique to space, but
non-space horror needs to do a bit of heavy lifting to produce the same feeling of
being trapped by the very environment. Global disaster movies often do a very good
job of convincing the audience that there's nowhere fully safe to run because the crisis
is everywhere, but in most horror stories, running is still the ultimate goal - even if
the crisis is global, there's somewhere that's safer than here. An island, an aircraft carrier,
a defensible military base, a facility researching a cure - there needs to be something, because
if the heroes have nowhere to run, the audience has nothing to root for. And sometimes that's the
point - maybe the heroes can't run so they fight or hide or hole up and build the best life
they can under the circumstances, or maybe the story isn't actually about them surviving
but is instead about communicating some other goal like emotional catharsis or character
development or a message on the fundamental nature of humanity or society or something.
But in space, there's never anywhere to run, at least not on a practical timescale. Running is
categorically not on the table. In space horror, there are always two monsters - the actual monster
and the cold unfeeling void. Running from one will just let the other one eat you. Instead, our
heroes have to manage both threats - frequently with a convenient "let's you and him fight" by
kicking the monster out of the airlock so it can deal with space instead. You know what they say,
you don't need to outrun the freezing void of space, you just need to outrun the xenomorph
you threw into the freezing void of space. Or something.
So… yeah!
