this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2025
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Cosmic Horror
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A community to discuss Cosmic Horror in it's many forms; books, films, comics, art, TV, music, RPGs, video games etc.
"cosmic horror... is a subgenre of horror fiction and weird fiction that emphasizes the horror of the unknowable and incomprehensible more than gore or other elements of shock... themes of cosmic dread, forbidden and dangerous knowledge, madness, non-human influences on humanity, religion and superstition, fate and inevitability, and the risks associated with scientific discoveries... the sense that ordinary life is a thin shell over a reality that is so alien and abstract in comparison that merely contemplating it would damage the sanity of the ordinary person, insignificance and powerlessness at the cosmic scale..."
- Wikipedia
For more Lovecraft & Mythos-inspired Cosmic Horror:-!lovecraft_mythos@lemmy.world
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Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot speech hits different depending on what you've been consuming lately.
It can be quite inspiring, or quite depressing
Every single thing experienced by all 100ish billion humans who ever lived, all their highs and lows, all the people they knew, all their hopes and dreams..... Could all be destroyed at the speed of light, and we would never have any way to see it coming, or stop it even if we did.
An asteroid could make the planet inhospitable to all but tiny organisms. A Gamma ray burst could pop off dozens of lightyears away. Coronal mass ejection burns the atmosphere. Rogue planet/black hole. False Vacuum decay could destroy baryonic matter.
Your entire life will be experienced, you live and die, and the universe at large will never even notice.
Some people find that depressing. I find it a little comforting. If nothing we do matters, we have to figure out how to make things matter to us. I uh.... I'm still working on that last bit... But it's a nice thought to me.
We are the rarest form of matter: thinking matter. You have value.
(from a collectible point of view)