I think anyone who finds the cosmic scale and vastness of the universe to be background noise really hasn’t understood cosmic scale. It’s still entirely possible to be horrified or amazed at the incomprehensible immensity of everything. Similarly, the bizarre probabilities and mysteries of waveform collapse of quantum physics.
Genuinely, I am baffled at the idea that anyone who has investigated any of these things might not feel some sort of vertiginous cosmic horror. This has only increased the more we have discovered in the hundred years since Lovecraft was writing.
Humans evolved to perceive, manipulate, and understand the world on human scales. When we try to reach beyond those scales, our intuition and so-called common sense fails us. The Earth is a globe but it seems flat and the sky looks like a dome. Really big numbers confound us.* Our finite mortal lives are a flash compared to geological time. There are bacteria and even animals crawling on our skin that are too small for us to see.** We struggle with these basic concepts, so when we start discussing an expanding universe, deep time, notions of infinity, black holes, and quantum mechanics, we really need to check our human-scale minds at the door. We must let science and mathematics guide us regardless of how absurd their observations and conclusions may seem.
[* In Watership Down, it is stated that rabbits cannot count beyond four. Humans are no different except our ceiling is higher. Sure, we can write down big numbers using creative notation (3↑↑↑2), descriptive language (1 followed by 100 zeroes), or analogy (all the atoms in the universe), but we really can’t comprehend them.
** The cells of your microbiome outnumber (or at least equal) your human cells.]
In the day to day, we never have to worry about cosmic scales. And if you stop and think about it, is the reaction horror or wonder? Or does it just roll off your neurons with a shrug? (Like thinking about the weather 5000 kilometers away and 8000 years ago.)
Nope. Gibbering terror here. Poss link to childhood fever dreams when ordinary stuff was just Too Big. Mathematical idiocy must be some class of contributory factor too, I suppose.
Weirdly, films in space, i.e. Star Wars or Star Trek don’t bother me; it’s the photos of space or those animations where they do flybys of planets (usually showing the path of a probe or something) just freak me out. All that blackness. I used to have a recurring nightmare when I was a kid (and a younger adult - disappeared when I was about 25, I have no idea why) of a sensation of falling into nothingness, forever. Maybe that is why it freaks me out so much, the idea that you could travel a bajillion miles and almost certainly not hit, or even come realistically close, to anything. at. all.
When I have difficulty sleeping, I picture a black hole (the modern visualization of one, with a black sphere surrounded by an accretion disk) and slowly being pulled into it as my perception of time (due to special relativity) elongates.
It tends to work pretty well. And, like counting sheep, the more clearly I can picture the accretion disk, or the size of the black hole itself, the faster I fall asleep. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I have never “reached” the black hole during these exercises, just slowly approached.
TL,DR; I picture the most clear image of oblivion I can until I fall asleep. It helps!
There were a few short steep sections at each end, but no scrambling. I did it easily in under 25 minutes, even exploring a few side-paths and lookout points.
It took me just under an hour, and climbing back up to the carpark (91 metres ASL) was perhaps a little bit more strenuous than my cardiologist would have advised. But here I am, safe and sound.
It’s one of two powder magazines where quarrying explosives were stored for the works at Trial Bay Gaol until 1903. The other is a pile of rubble, having been blown up by vandals in 1919.
