[tsujamin]

You say beautiful, I say existentially terrifying, let’s split the difference

[GolfPopper]

I think that's why H.P. Lovecraft's work still resonates - he first captured that cosmic sense of horror that came with humanity starting to understand our place in the universe, and how tiny and insignificant it really is.

I caught some of that sense not too long ago, looking at the Moon with a new-to-me (amateur) telescope and wide-field eyepiece. Some combination of the seeing conditions and optics let my mind really connect with what I was seeing, in a way it never had before in decades of amateur astronomy. I understood that what I was looking at - grokked it, if you will allow - across an abyss that was incomprehensibly vast to me, but still only the tiniest of distances of the scale of the solar system, let alone the universe, was a whole other world, a vast globe of rock and dust, moving through the void, its mountains and valleys utterly empty of the air, water life that has always surrounded me.

My description doesn't really do it justice. It was the first time I'd ever really gotten a sense for the scales involved in my hobby, where what I was looking at felt real and not just an image through an eyepice and it made me catch my breath. Amazing, disturbing, and a little frightening all at once.

[jvanderbot]

Once, I had the opportunity to view Saturn through a university telescope. You know the kind with a motorized dome and car sized actuators and such.

It was so, so visible and yet so, so far. Somehow using all that power to see it in real time and still have it be small but look so insanely huge somehow.

I had this vertigo and the scale of the solar system kind of rushed at me. Just like you say.

[itishappy]

I feel like the moment you learn the relative scales, it's over, there's no going back.

There's a billion WWII ending atom bombs going off every day up there. How are we still ok?

[wffurr]

My preferred design for fusion reactors uses gravitational confinement and are placed 150 million miles away.

[layer8]

We would be much worse off without it.

[tomrod]

Distance squared law of gravity.

[lazide]

Hey, at least we can’t hear the screaming (/s).

Distance/dilution really is the solution eh? Besides, without all those fusion bombs going off our air would be liquid/solid, which is extremely inconvenient.

[srean]

There was this sci-fi story set on the sun. Humans interact with sentient plasma, some as old as the universe. Forgetting the name.

[stevenwoo]

Sundiver is most prominent in my recollection.

[amelius]

Soon coming to a fusion reactor near you.