The Beautiful Horror of Deep Space

Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.
-- Arthur C. Clarke

Play Under a Star Called Sun: https://haraiva.itch.io/under-a-star-...
Play The Anglerfish Project: https://selkieharbour.itch.io/the-ang...

If the world was ending, and you could save only one hundred and sixteen images as the final record of planet Earth, what kind of moments would you preserve?

This is an actual question NASA faced in 1977, when they decided to attach to the Voyager spacecrafts golden records encoded with a selection of photos intended to immortalize life on our fragile planet. And when I look at these pictures, which have now left our solar system and are hurtling out into the cosmic dark, I can’t get out of my head how they will probably be all that’s left of us one day. In the vacuum of space, these images could last for billions of years, outliving the earth, outliving the sun.

And though that should maybe be comforting… I think it scares me.

0:00 Fear of Deep Space
1:06 Gazing into the Abyss
3:52 A Dog Named Laika
7:24 Under a Star Called Sun
9:54 True Emptiness
11:28 Signaling Aliens
13:57 Dark Forest Hypothesis
16:22 Pale Blue Dot
18:55 Space Madness
20:20 The Year Without Summer
22:22 End of the Universe

Media Shown: 2001 A Space Odyssey, Solaris, Outer Wilds, Silent Running, High Life, Under a Star Called Sun, Star Wars, Star Trek, The Expanse, The Anglerfish Project, A Trip to the Moon, From Earth to the Moon, Mars and Beyond, War of the Worlds, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Alien, Alien: Covenant, Alien: Isolation, Deep Impact

♫ Music Used – Left Alone – Ending Theme 2 (Detention), Komorebi (Gris), Windmill (Gris), Unagi (Gris), Sevastopol Abandoned (Alien: Isolation), Alien Reveal (Alien: Isolation), The Sun Station (Outer Wilds), 14.3 Billion Years (Outer Wilds), Back and Forth (Cloud Gardens), Kinds of Flowers (Voyager’s Golden Record)

♫ Additional music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com):
Bittersweet
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b...

SOURCES:
Golden Record: https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/golden-r...
The Sad, Sad Story of Laika: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smiths...
Earth’s Magnetosphere: https://science.nasa.gov/science-rese...
Risks of Space Exploration: https://humanresearchroadmap.nasa.gov...
Red Giant Suns: https://www.space.com/22471-red-giant...
End of the Milky Way: https://www.science.org/content/artic...

Copyright Disclaimer: Under section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for “fair use” for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, education, and research. All video/image content is edited under fair use rights for reasons of commentary. I do not own the images, music, or footage used in this video. All rights and credit goes to the original owners.