The scariest universe

A winning strategy for making a scary movie is to repeatedly startle the audience with things that jump out on screen. A winning strategy for making a scary movie set in space is to have aliens jump out on screen. Add some tension-filled music, and what you've got is fear that translates well to film.

But fear felt while watching a movie is a lot different than fear felt outside the cinema, in real life. Outside, a prankster who hides behind a tree or garbage can and waits for you to pass nearby before jumping out and shouting “Boo!” may cause your heart rate to spike, but being startled like that is the exception. These days, being born human comes with the privilege of not being prey, and our fear is mostly driven by less-jumpy emotions such as worry, dread, and despair. So though our scariest movies about space involve aliens jumping out at the audience, our real-life fears about space are different.

Possibly the scariest thought about space is the idea that it's empty and impassable on scales that matter—that we're forever stuck on this planet. Only (as this idea goes), it's not even for forever that we're stuck; the average duration of a mammalian species is a couple million years, and so humans will probably have what in geological terms is a pittance of time to enjoy being stuck here. Then, soon after we're gone, most evidence of our existence will be wiped out, with only some plastics and interstellar radio waves lasting awhile longer to serve as our legacy in an uncaring, mindless universe.

Stuck here on Earth with each other. Stuck in a nest that we foul. We never end poverty, or war, or beat all diseases, or learn the answers to all questions. We muddle through, generation and generation, each responding to the challenges of its times, solving some problems while creating others. Our numbers rise and fall until our species enters into a terminal decline, after which we're all gone and no one is left to ascribe meaning to any of it.

So the next time an alien jumps out at you on screen, take delight in being startled—in imagining a universe that's not vast and barren. It's not as lonely as a universe as we may have, and it's nowhere near as scary.