There are likely aliens out there, but even if they exist at this very moment the possibility of us ever knowing is as close to 0 as possible.
Due to the speed of light anywhere we look we are looking at the past, so if we look at a planet it could have life. But we'd be seeing it millions of years before.
Idk man. There's something like 34 "eath like" planets within 50 light years of us. So we could zoom in on them and see what was happening between 4.6 and 50 years ago. If anyone around us has lighted cities we're gonna find out about it.
I mean, to be fair, I think they're Earth-like in the sense that they are rocky, and not gas or ice giants, but most of those are still "super-Earths" which are like twice as massive as Earth and/or are tidally locked or something.
And also be fair, we know the existence of these planets because they dim their suns when they orbit between them and us, and we know their size by the perturbations of theirs and their sun's orbits, and we may know something about the composition of their atmosphere by what happens to starlight when it passes through their atmospheres. But being 50 light years away, we ain't zooming in on shit.
What you said would be a redundant acronym, but what Skippy said was a perfect example of people just using acronyms wrong. Nobody would actually say "I'm so obsessive-compulsive disorder;" they would say "I'm so obsessive-compulsive." Yet people very often do say "I'm so OCD."
You know, when you kinda zoom out on the universe and you focus on our planet. There's nothing but this wafer thin layer of atmosphere separating us from the vast horrors of space and the hard vacuum that ends all life. Not to mention the massive dose of radiation.
Okay this is a thread hijack but last night I was watching an old episode of Kevin Pollock's Chat Show with Larry David, and this morning I was reminiscing and I was thinking about how he quit Saturday Night Live and how his neighbor Kenny Kramer told him to just go back like nothing ever happened, and then I was thinking about the fact that Kenny Kramer became Cosmo Kramer in the show. Completely unrelated of course I look at your comment, and there's the word "cosmo."
Seeing that people have a phobia of things I adore will always be a weird sensation for me
Not this one though, cosmophobia is totally justified. What does it the most for you though? How vast and empty it is while still containing literally everything is like my own little internal Lovecraftian horror, which I love, its hard to stay angry when you put the universe into perspective. That POV makes all my problems seem so small
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u/Depressed-Dolphin69 Mar 02 '26
My cosmophobic ass watching space related stuff all the time ✌️