A Big Collection of NOPE! - 22 Terrifying Facts About Space

Space, the final frontier. But is it a frontier we should bother trying to cross?

Published 9 months ago in Wow

Space is the final frontier but is it a frontier we should bother trying to cross? By its very nature space is the most hostile environment possible, and it carries with it unimaginable dangers that the human mind can barely comprehend. The more we learn about the universe the less it makes sense, and the more spooky everything gets.

For example, take the fact that the universe is expanding. Except when I say that, I don't mean that the edges of the universe are just getting bigger. Literally, the space between all the space is getting bigger. Our atoms are slowly expanding away from each other. In billions and billions of years, the universe will have expanded apart from itself so far, that anyone still around will have no idea that there's anything else even out there. That, and the great attraction will have already swallowed up everything in its way.

1
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 2,000. It’s also growing. If the Milky Way had been in the center of the Boötes void, we wouldn't have known there were other galaxies until the 1960s.

3
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. This is what inspired the movie “Gravity.”
4

5
Gamma ray bursts. A tsunami of cosmic gamma-rays hitting Earth would set our atmosphere on fire and sterilize at least one half of our planet. Very brief flashes of energetic gamma-rays from space were discovered in the late 1960s.
6
7
Vacuum decay. It’s possible that the energy in our universe is not at its resting state, and will decide to revert to that, wiping out our matter as we know it.

8
9
This visual shows how slow light speed is and how vast space is, depending on which way you look at it. I've seen videos showing the scale of the universe before, but this one really hit home for some reason. The speed of light, the fastest speed possible, looks painfully slow when you look at it in the context of even a fraction of our solar system.
10

11
Yang Liwei was the first astronaut sent into space by China. Once up there, he repeatedly heard a mysterious knocking on the door of his spacecraft, like someone knocking to come in. He couldn’t see anything out of the window. Of course, sound doesn’t travel in space. He reported it once he was back on the ground. Other Chinese astronauts have since reported similar knocking. To this day, nobody knows for sure what the knocking sound really is.
12
13
Mobile black holes. I think the only thing we could do is literally move the planet and/or solar system out of its way. That's the most realistic thing we could do.

14
15
16
Voyager 1 will outlive planet earth. It is “plausible” to imagine that Voyager 1 will outlive our planet given how incomprehensibly vast space really is. Voyager 2 might as well.