Here's An Ultimate Hotlist Of 34 Terrifying Facts About The Universe Folks Are Unaware Of

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 many satellites currently orbit, plus the continued growth of the commercial space industry... I think about it a lot.

If you gathered together all the matter in the universe we can observe right now and squished it together until it had the density of water (1gm/cm^3) it would fit into a cube about 1 light year on each side. There are several disturbing things about this:

-A single light year is almost unimaginably huge
-A cubic light year is a ridiculous volume of space
-The observable universe is 33 orders of magnitude larger than that
-It is almost entirely empty.

Rogue planets

Such objects have been ejected from the planetary system in which they were formed or have never been gravitationally bound to any star or brown dwarf. If a rogue planet invade our Solar System, things could go very wrong.

The largest black hole we have discovered has a diameter of 490.000.000.000 km. Earths diameter is roughly 13.000 km.

The farthest galaxy we can detect was 13.4 billion light years away when it emitted the light we see today.

That light (not the galaxy, the light itself) is three times as old as the Earth.

It's size and age alone is disturbing. I have had an ongoing existentialcris crisis since I was a child when I realized just how small and vulnerable we are.

"Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is. I mean you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space" - Douglas Adams.

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.

Tom_Brokaw_is_a_Punk replied:

On the other hand, you'll never know. You'll just blink out of existence one day. So nothing to worry about.

On the surface of Mars right now is a Blur CD

God help us if aliens find that first.

[deleted] replied:

You need to answer this, and it is vitally important. What blur cd?

the_Athereon said:

Beagle 2 crash landed with a Blur album saved on board its computer. The intent was to broadcast the music playing from the surface of Mars.

[deleted] asked:

The second vital question, does that album include parklife? If not all hope is lost

The Bootes void. An area of space where there should be 50,000 or so galaxies (compared to other areas of the same size)but there's only about 60. Could just be empty space for some unknown reason, or it could be an ever expanding intergalactic empire using Dyson spheres. Also I think it appears to be growing but that could just be galaxies moving away from the void

Edit: so it turns out it's 2000 and obviously it's not gonna be aliens but the theory is still cool af.

MOBILE

BLACK HOLES.

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 https://youtu.be/PmmHfhwFlQQ.

We still don't know exactly how it came into existence.

[deleted] replied:

true.
Fine tuned?
Coincidence?
Big Bang?
Something else?
it always existed?

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 just think there is no way to fully understand the universe and there never will be. This is why even ancient societies explained things with gods because they didn’t understand how the reality we live in started and I don’t think we ever will.

I think everything is terrifying about space, and I f*****g 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.