Graphic by Autumn Tate
Article by Sophia Cederburg
What is your biggest fear? The dark? Heights? Failure? Tiny holes? Those are some popular answers that might come to mind, but what about the fear of space?
Astrophobia, or the fear of outer space, stems from the unease surrounding celestial objects and the cosmos. There are many specific reasons one might fear space, but most of the time, the anxiety is due to the unknown. Humans inhabit an extremely small rock floating in a big black abyss that is almost entirely unexplored. For most, that in and of itself is terrifying enough. And if a person isn’t scared by the lack of knowledge about space, they’re scared of our planet’s unimportance. Earth takes up pretty much zero percent of the universe’s volume. We are virtually insignificant in the grand scale of the universe, and to many, that isolation is the scariest thing of all.
Astrophobia can also be triggered by astromegalophobia, which is the fear of large objects in space. This fear mostly revolves around planets, and even more specifically, gas giants. There are many reasons to be afraid of gas giants. For starters, they’re completely foreign to our own planet. The gaseous composition of planets such as Neptune and Saturn mean that there is no defineable surface, which is to say that if a human made it to one of these planets, they would plummet through the clouds until they exploded from the pressure. But for many, the size alone is enough to elicit unease. Jupiter, for example, is 11 times the size of Earth. These sizable, ominous objects are not only visually terrifying, but they’re extremely dangerous too, characterized by deadly gases, extreme temperatures and intense weather conditions.
There is one more major trigger of astrophobia, and this is the fear of space exploration, simply referred to as space phobia. This phobia comes from the fear of leaving anything known. When exploring space, one is put into a completely unknown environment. There is also the fear of what we could find in space. From supermassive black holes to extraterrestrial life, we really do not know what we could find hidden in the cosmos, and to any rational person, that is a cause of fear.
Space is incomprehensible to the human mind, and maybe that is what makes it so scary. As far as we know, we are alone in this vast universe, surviving under precarious conditions and hoping nothing upsets our planet’s balance.