In Space No One Can Hear You Scream, But That's Not The Scariest Thing About Being There

The infinite void of space is a vast, mostly unknown place that we're still researching and exploring. It is because of just how unknown it is that many find space to be a truly terrifying place. Due to its inherently frightening nature, Reddit users have begun sharing what they feel the scariest thing about space really is. Users shared their fears in a thread on r/AskReddit on Wednesday. While some answers were jokes (a Blur CD on Mars), many Redditors used the forum to voice some existential fears about what lies outside the observable universe, the future of Earth and our Solar System, and catastrophic disasters that could hypothetically affect us.

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Here are five scary facts and mysteries about space, as decided by Reddit users. Vacuum Decay A user named Marycate11 suggested the concept of "Vacuum Decay" as one of the scariest concepts. "We don't know if it exists, and we won't know until it's too late," she wrote. In a 2015 article, Cosmos Magazine explained the concept about as simply as possible. The idea is that a vacuum could expand and completely disrupt the norms of our universe, effectively killing everyone instantly. The Vast, Emptiness So many Redditors focused on the emptiness and inherently lonely nature of space. A user named blahblahrasputan likened it to taking a road trip and driving for hours without seeing anything interesting. "Imagine doing that for years travelling [sic] to another planet," they wrote. Another user shared a video that shows just how slow traveling at light speed is. Rogue Planets No, these were not just an invention by Lars Von Trier for Melancholia. These are planets that don't follow an orbit and are difficult to study. Because rogue planets don't orbit stars and such, they're hard to track and harder to study. New space telescopes could offer opportunities to study them. While there's still a lot to learn about rogue planets, Back2Bach, the user who posted about them, seems to suggest they are scary, with a fear that one may try to knock Earth out of its orbit. "They were most likely knocked out of their orbit by another body, and now they are set on doing the same," they wrote. Carrington Event of 1859 One astronomer, whose user name is Andromeda321, chimed in on the thread to tell most people that their suggestions likely will not affect earth, but he did point to an observance by Richard Carrington in the 19th Century. According to the History Channel, the event caused telegraphs to stop working, shocking operators and setting papers on fire. The auroras lit up the sky so much that people thought both that it was morning and the apocalypse had begun. "If a similar event were to strike earth today, it would cause billions of dollars in damage," Andromeda321 wrote. According to the user, the scariest part about this incident is that "we really have no idea how often such events happen. But we do know that in 2012 there was a Carrington-level solar flare that barely missed Earth," What else? Not to get too existential, but some Redditors couldn't help but question what else is there or could there have been? A user named canned_shrimp asked what could have been before the Big Bang, and cited the pure difficulty that humans have in understanding both infinity and absolute nothingness. A user named Tarktokwetsh asked that if there is an end to space, what's passed the end? Another user named pissbeard responded asking further questions: "Then you think about why the universe came into being, did it come from nothing or was there something before? Why is there something rather than nothing?" Who knows?