Speaker 1: Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. This
Speaker 1: is Robert Lamb. I'm recording all of these intros, by
Speaker 1: the way, in Batch while Joe is on holiday leave.
Speaker 1: He has of course since back, and I am speaking
Speaker 1: to you from the past, but that's why you're not
Speaker 1: hearing Joe on any of these intros for the Horror
Speaker 1: Vacuui series. This, by the way, is part four of
Speaker 1: our series from last year, Horror VACUUEI I hope you
Speaker 1: enjoy it.
Speaker 2: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, the production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: Hey you, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
Speaker 1: name is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 3: And I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with part four
Speaker 3: of our series on horror. Vacui or fear of the
Speaker 3: void or fear of the vacuum, a concept that has
Speaker 3: relevance in art and design, where it describes an pulse
Speaker 3: to fill in blank or uniform spaces with detail, as
Speaker 3: well as relevance in philosophy and in physics, where it's
Speaker 3: been used to describe the long standing belief, often derived
Speaker 3: from Aristotle, that a vacuum or a void could not
Speaker 3: exist in nature, and that empty space was in fact
Speaker 3: an incoherent concept. So in the previous episode of this
Speaker 3: one we talked about how this view in physics persisted
Speaker 3: through the Middle Ages and part of the early Modern
Speaker 3: period in Europe until important experiments by figures like Evangelista Torricelli,
Speaker 3: the man with the batman symbol for a mustache, or
Speaker 3: rob I think, as you pointed out, the sort of
Speaker 3: the crucifix goatee.
Speaker 1: M h yeah, sort of a crucifix Van.
Speaker 3: Dyck, Yeah, yeah, him and in Blaze, Pascal of course
Speaker 3: established that an approximate vacuum could actually be created inside
Speaker 3: a glass tube, and that the force truly responsible for
Speaker 3: preventing a void from forming in most cases, such as
Speaker 3: in the case of like a pump or a siphon,
Speaker 3: was not Nature's mysterious hatred for vacuums, but in fact
Speaker 3: the weight of the air we breathe, known today as
Speaker 3: atmospheric pressure. But something we alluded to in the previous
Speaker 3: episode is also the fact that while the laws of
Speaker 3: nature don't exactly rule out a vacuum in the way
Speaker 3: that Aristotle and the Scholastics thought, there is also some
Speaker 3: nuance to the issue, because you can create an approximate vacuum,
Speaker 3: but it's really hard or perhaps impossible to create a
Speaker 3: perfect vacuum, depending on how you define your goals. When
Speaker 3: we talk about a vacuum in like real world examples
Speaker 3: instead of you know, ideal thought experiments, we are never
Speaker 3: talking about completely empty spaces with no particles whatsoever. Instead,
Speaker 3: we're usually talking about an area where the density of
Speaker 3: gas particles is very or the inside of a container
Speaker 3: where the density of gas particles is much lower than
Speaker 3: the density of particles on the outside. And the latter
Speaker 3: type of vacuum where a container that has a lower
Speaker 3: density of gas particles than the world outside, is common
Speaker 3: throughout the world of technology and electrical appliances and scientific equipment,
Speaker 3: especially of years past, but still somewhat today. A couple
Speaker 3: of classic examples incandescent light bulbs. They make light by
Speaker 3: running current through a filament that gets so hot that
Speaker 3: it starts to emit photons it starts to glow. But
Speaker 3: these bulbs are not full of air at regular atmospheric pressure,
Speaker 3: and if they were that would be a problem. The
Speaker 3: filament would tend to fail very quickly. That's not good
Speaker 3: for incandescent bulbs, so instead they are typically either filled
Speaker 3: with an inert gas like argon or nitrogen, or they
Speaker 3: are pumped out to contain a vacuum. The earliest light
Speaker 3: bulbs were vacuum based rather than inert gas based. Another
Speaker 3: component used in electronics, one that will be very familiar
Speaker 3: to electric guitar players, is vacuum tubes, which were once
Speaker 3: commonly used to manipulate current to amplify and rectify electrical signals.
Speaker 3: They've been replaced with silicon transistors in most modern devices,
Speaker 3: but they still have their uses. And by the way,
Speaker 3: if you want to see something really weird and awesome,
Speaker 3: look up pictures of vacuum tube based computers before transistors
Speaker 3: took over to become the logic circuitry inside computers. I
Speaker 3: guess that happened roughly around the sixties or so. But
Speaker 3: before that, the information processing in computers was done on
Speaker 3: large arrays of vacuum tubes. And I'm very tempted to
Speaker 3: say like that, I wish to see a certain kind
Speaker 3: of computer snobbery arise, where there are like gamers who
Speaker 3: are like, oh, you play on transistors, I've got a
Speaker 3: vacuum tube rig.
Speaker 1: Yeah, some of the images that come up from me
Speaker 1: they look very there's a mad science quality to these.
Speaker 1: They look like there's some sort of strange experiment containing
Speaker 1: you know, contained gases or something.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it does look like that because they look like
Speaker 3: almost like kind of like pills in a blister pack,
Speaker 3: you know, the little blisters popping out, But they're not
Speaker 3: containing special gases. They are containing lower density of gases.
Speaker 3: What those tubes contain is relatively nothing compared to the atmosphere. Now.
Speaker 3: One place tubes are still popular in electrical devices today
Speaker 3: is in guitar amplifiers, where a lot of players prefer
Speaker 3: the feeling of playing with tubes as opposed to solid
Speaker 3: state amps. Rob, I don't know if you've ever come
Speaker 3: across this debate, you know, sometimes I think people look
Speaker 3: on the tube preference as a kind of snobbery. Personally,
Speaker 3: I can see both sides, Like, I think solid state
Speaker 3: amps sound great, but tubes are. They're cool? Yeah.
Speaker 1: Not being a guitar player myself, I rarely get any
Speaker 1: of these conversations and rarely hear any of this. So
Speaker 1: is this something where I know a lot of conversations
Speaker 1: for regarding retro technology and music and recording and production,
Speaker 1: it actually does come through to the final product. It
Speaker 1: actually is something that affects the final sound of the music.
Speaker 1: Is that the case here?
Speaker 3: People argue about this. The people argue about to what
Speaker 3: extent you can hear the difference in something that comes
Speaker 3: out of a tube versus a good modern attempt to
Speaker 3: approximate that with transistors. I'm not going to try to
Speaker 3: weigh in on one side of the debate here. Basically,
Speaker 3: my experience is that solid state amps sound fine. They
Speaker 3: sound great, but there's also just something kind of cool
Speaker 3: about tubes. They might kind of feel differently when you're
Speaker 3: playing a guitar through one, especially if you're in the
Speaker 3: room with it as opposed to listening to a recording.
Speaker 3: I'm not sure.
Speaker 1: Yeah, listeners, let us know. Do you think tubes are
Speaker 1: tubular or do you think solid state is solid? I
Speaker 1: don't know.
Speaker 3: I will weigh in and say I think it's a
Speaker 3: stupid thing to like get mad at people or criticize
Speaker 3: people about one way or another. Calm down, guys, fair enough,
Speaker 3: But coming back to the bigger point. In cases like
Speaker 3: the vacuum light bulb or the vacuum tube for current amplification,
Speaker 3: the area inside the glass in these devices is again
Speaker 3: not a perfect vacuum. There are particles of atmosphere in there,
Speaker 3: they're just way fewer of them than in an equivalent
Speaker 3: area outside. And there are actually designations for the different
Speaker 3: levels of vacuum that are achieved through technological means. You know,
Speaker 3: you can have like a medium vacuum, a high vacuum,
Speaker 3: an ultra high vacuum, and so that's what's possible on Earth.
Speaker 3: But then you might be wondering in response to that,
Speaker 3: Wait a minute, though, isn't outer space at least a vacuum.
Speaker 3: Isn't the space between the planets or the space between
Speaker 3: the stars at least a vacuum. Again, the answer here
Speaker 3: is yes and no. It depends on what you mean.
Speaker 3: Space is a vacuum when compared to earth atmosphere, and
Speaker 3: it is even lower density than most partial vacuums created
Speaker 3: by humans. I was trying to find a good estimate
Speaker 3: for the density of outer space, and I came across
Speaker 3: a couple things in that book I was talking about
Speaker 3: In the last episode called the Void by the physicists,
Speaker 3: Frank Close, he writes about while he's writing about the
Speaker 3: reasoning that led people to assume that outer space was
Speaker 3: a vacuum when scientists such as Blaize Pascal started to
Speaker 3: notice that the atmospheric pressure was different at different altitude.
Speaker 3: So you go up on a mountain, the atmospheric pressure
Speaker 3: is lower. That does tend to suggest that if you
Speaker 3: go higher and higher, the density of particles just keeps
Speaker 3: getting lower and lower, and you would eventually reach an
Speaker 3: altitude at which there was effectively nowhere to breathe anymore.
Speaker 3: There was no atmosphere anymore, which some people found maybe
Speaker 3: kind of like threatening in principle or maybe threatening to
Speaker 3: their theological ideas of how the universe was put together. Nevertheless,
Speaker 3: you could show it was true. As you go higher
Speaker 3: and higher the density gets lower. So close, writes quote,
Speaker 3: at a height of one hundred kilometers, the pressure is
Speaker 3: less than a billionth of that on the ground, at
Speaker 3: four hundred kilometers a million millionth, and en route to
Speaker 3: the moon in space it is down by ten to
Speaker 3: the nineteen, an amount that is less than the size
Speaker 3: of a proton compared to a kilometer. We can thus
Speaker 3: say that essentially all of the atmosphere is a thin
Speaker 3: shell whose thickness is less than one thousandth of the
Speaker 3: Earth's radius. Wow, I don't doubt that's true. But that's
Speaker 3: the kind of thing that I don't even I don't
Speaker 3: usually picture it that way. I you know, I picture
Speaker 3: the atmosphere is extending much higher up off the surface
Speaker 3: of the Earth.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know. For me, this like the reality of
Speaker 1: the thinning of the air at the higher altitude you
Speaker 1: get to. This was always kind of spelled out from
Speaker 1: by looking at something like the Lockheed you to the
Speaker 1: spy aircraft that had these just a super long, super
Speaker 1: wide wingspan then enabled it one of several design functions,
Speaker 1: but the most obvious one that enabled it to fly
Speaker 1: at such high altitudes where there is just there's less air.
Speaker 3: Yes, the air is thinner, it's harder and harder to
Speaker 3: generate lyft. But okay, that's how much thinner the atmosphere
Speaker 3: gets as you extend up off of the surface of
Speaker 3: the Earth. What about when you go even beyond that? Well,
Speaker 3: I came across some sort of quick and dirty estimates
Speaker 3: by a radio astronomer named Alistair Gunn doing a short
Speaker 3: Q and A for the BBC, And note that the
Speaker 3: following are approximate. But what gun says is that roughly
Speaker 3: within the Solar System space between the planets contains an
Speaker 3: average of about five atoms per cubic centimeter, so that's
Speaker 3: very low density, but there's still is gas out there.
Speaker 3: It's just extremely dispersed. In interstellar space the space between
Speaker 3: solar systems in our galaxy, so like where you know
Speaker 3: where the voyager probes are eventually headed to, or where
Speaker 3: Omuamua came from. That interstellar space has about one atom
Speaker 3: per cubic centimeter according to gun here. And then in
Speaker 3: intergalactic space, the space between galaxies, the density is about
Speaker 3: one hundred times less than that. It gets pretty lonely
Speaker 3: out there, right, but still there are not no particles.
Speaker 3: They just get farther and farther apart on average. So
Speaker 3: the reason space is so empty is of course gravity.
Speaker 3: Objects with mass attract one another, so mass tends to
Speaker 3: clump together over time, creating this varied terrain of cosmic density,
Speaker 3: with very high density say in the middle of a star,
Speaker 3: and still lower density around that star and around the
Speaker 3: planets around that star, and then lower density in between
Speaker 3: the stars, and then lower density in between the galaxies
Speaker 3: and so forth. But it wasn't always this way. In
Speaker 3: the early history of the universe, matter was dispersed far
Speaker 3: more evenly, and you could think of the early universe
Speaker 3: in a way as a kind of well, in a
Speaker 3: strange way, almost kind of like an ocean. I guess
Speaker 3: it wasn't liquid, but like an ocean or a cloud
Speaker 3: or something where there were more uniform distributions. But then
Speaker 3: as space expanded that more varied terrain that we know
Speaker 3: today influenced by gravity emerged.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, so yeah, the accretion of these various
Speaker 1: cosmic bodies of different sizes, and then the resulting sort
Speaker 1: of shrinkage between these accretions.
Speaker 3: So in a weird way, you could argue that Aristotle
Speaker 3: is kind of technically vindicated in that there probably are
Speaker 3: no large scale, long term areas of perfectly empty space
Speaker 3: in the universe. But I think that in the normal
Speaker 3: way of understanding Aristotle, he was wrong. You can create
Speaker 3: a of functional vacuum, but it's not a perfect vacuum.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it sounds like you can also do a
Speaker 1: fair amount of arguing over the size of said vacuum.
Speaker 3: Yeah. This was making me wonder, like, what is the
Speaker 3: average density of the universe overall? And so I was
Speaker 3: looking around at that I did find a NASA page
Speaker 3: on this This is according to research I think carried
Speaker 3: out by w MAP by the Wilkinson Microwave an isotropy
Speaker 3: probe that was looking at fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background,
Speaker 3: and in a write up on that research by NASA
Speaker 3: that they say, quote w MAP determined that the universe
Speaker 3: is flat, from which it follows that the mean energy
Speaker 3: density in the universe is equal to the critical density
Speaker 3: within a zero point five percent margin of error. This
Speaker 3: is equivalent to a mass density of because as an aside,
Speaker 3: ultimately mass and energy can be exchanged for one another,
Speaker 3: they are equivalently. You know, mass is just a huge
Speaker 3: amount of energy. Coming back to the quote, this is
Speaker 3: equivalent to a mass density of nine point nine times
Speaker 3: ten to the negative thirty grams per cubic centimeter. But
Speaker 3: the density of normal matter is not even that high
Speaker 3: because most of the energy density in the universe is
Speaker 3: not normal matter. It's dark matter or dark energy. So
Speaker 3: maybe normal is not even the right word, because the
Speaker 3: kind of matter we're talking about that we're familiar with
Speaker 3: is the minority of stuff. Less than five percent of
Speaker 3: the stuff in the universe is actually made of atoms.
Speaker 3: So the quote actual energy density of atoms is equivalent
Speaker 3: to roughly one proton per four cubic meters. So you
Speaker 3: can imagine kind of a like a large palette box
Speaker 3: and that's like one proton in there, and that's the
Speaker 3: average density of the universe.
Speaker 1: Yes, so if we were to like redistribute it, that's
Speaker 1: how it would play out.
Speaker 3: I think we should redistribute it. Get a fresh start
Speaker 3: on this thing. Now.
Speaker 1: These numbers are admittedly maybe a little bit challenging to
Speaker 1: sort of picture in your head all the time, But
Speaker 1: I do like that we're dealing with hard numbers here.
Speaker 1: We're doing with dealing with objective numbers related to the
Speaker 1: vacuum and the void, something we don't always have in
Speaker 1: this particular journey. Sometimes we're dealing with very very subjective qualities.
Speaker 3: Oh, you mean, like Aristotle's argument that you couldn't have
Speaker 3: empty space because if it not be body, it could
Speaker 3: not exist.
Speaker 1: Yeah, or certainly getting into some of the philosophical ends
Speaker 1: of the spectrum where we're dealing with what's the difference
Speaker 1: between emptiness and nothingness, what's the difference between eternity and
Speaker 1: nothing It can get a little loosey goosey.
Speaker 3: Well, the difference between I'm going to defend exploring the
Speaker 3: difference between emptiness and nothingness. I think that is an
Speaker 3: interesting distinction, but one that I'm not sure science has
Speaker 3: all the answers on.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean a lot of it does come down
Speaker 1: to the subjective experience. I was talking with my wife
Speaker 1: before I came in here, and she brought up the
Speaker 1: example of isolation tanks. Isolation tanks being a situation where
Speaker 1: on one level, you have certainly limited your space. You
Speaker 1: were isolated or within a tank. You're floating within a tank,
Speaker 1: and therefore you're cutting off how much of the outside
Speaker 1: world you were in. But then there is also something
Speaker 1: to the experience that is boundary breaking. You know, floating
Speaker 1: in this salt bath that is the same temperature as
Speaker 1: your body serves to sort of break down the division
Speaker 1: between where you stop and the rest of the world begins. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: there are plenty of cases like you don't have to
Speaker 1: have an isolation tank to engage in that kind of
Speaker 1: boundary dispute, you know.
Speaker 3: I think it's interesting that people often seek maybe not
Speaker 3: isolation tanks exactly, but isolation from stimuli specifically in order
Speaker 3: to be creative, and that kind of strange that almost
Speaker 3: implies that they think a principle of psychological horror vacay
Speaker 3: is going to come into effect, right, that if you
Speaker 3: rob yourself of the normal overwhelming stimuli of everyday existence,
Speaker 3: you will get your eyes like, you will team with ideas.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but it is one of these things too, where
Speaker 1: it's like a lot of times you're just you're just
Speaker 1: changing out one high stimuli environment for another, and maybe
Speaker 1: it's just a new one, a novel one. Like when
Speaker 1: you go to the beach and you walk on the beach. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a different experience than being stuck in a city
Speaker 1: or in a library or in your own house. But
Speaker 1: I mean that there's a lot going on at the beach.
Speaker 1: You know, there's crashing waves and expanses of sand and
Speaker 1: birds and all sorts of little shells to look at. Likewise,
Speaker 1: of course, a walk through the woods is just I mean,
Speaker 1: we've talked about this before on the podcast, Like your
Speaker 1: your senses are able to fully engage age in the
Speaker 1: environment for which they have evolved, taking in all these
Speaker 1: details and changing details in the world around you.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, that does relate to these theories about how
Speaker 3: nature tends to engage our attention in a different way
Speaker 3: than built environments do, and that essentially that I've forgotten
Speaker 3: all the details of exactly what that theory is, but
Speaker 3: it that nature can basically be absorbing to the attention
Speaker 3: but essentially not stress inducing.
Speaker 1: I think, yeah, And of course it is not even
Speaker 1: getting into social isolation cutting yourself off from wanted and
Speaker 1: unwanted social connections. Certainly there's a lot to be said
Speaker 1: for cutting yourself off from the connection to one's smart
Speaker 1: device and the Internet and so forth.
Speaker 3: Finally, before we move on from this, I was wondering,
Speaker 3: what are the superlatives in terms of vacuums created by
Speaker 3: humans in the laboratory or with the aid of technology.
Speaker 3: What's the lowest pressure humans can achieve. I'm not sure
Speaker 3: what the answer is in terms of the lowest pressure overall,
Speaker 3: but I definitely came across a contender, and it is
Speaker 3: certainly one of the most impressive artificial vacuum systems ever
Speaker 3: created by humans, if not the lowest pressure. And it's
Speaker 3: actually the Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest particle accelerator,
Speaker 3: which is operated by the European Organization for Nuclear Research
Speaker 3: or CERN. I believe it is still the largest vacuum
Speaker 3: system in operation in the world. It was certainly at
Speaker 3: the time it was put together, and I can't think
Speaker 3: of what would be larger than it. But it has
Speaker 3: more than one hundred kilometers of piping held in a
Speaker 3: state of vacuum for various purposes. There has to be
Speaker 3: ultra high vacuum piping for the actual particle beams to
Speaker 3: travel through so that like the accelerated particles don't collide
Speaker 3: with gas molecule and ruin the experiments. I'm not sure
Speaker 3: what would happen if they did collide. Maybe it could
Speaker 3: be worse than ruining experiments. Certainly wouldn't be good. You
Speaker 3: don't want it. But there are also advanced vacuum systems
Speaker 3: used to like insulate other elements of the collider, such
Speaker 3: as the magnets or the helium distribution line. So a
Speaker 3: lot of evacuated space going on at the LHC facility,
Speaker 3: and it's at extremely low density. They compare various vacua
Speaker 3: that they create to the density of interstellar space, so
Speaker 3: that is horror vacuity in physics. But one thing I've
Speaker 3: been wanting to come back to is the fear of
Speaker 3: emptiness or the fear of empty spaces as an actual
Speaker 3: literal fear that humans feel the kind of uneasiness that
Speaker 3: one experiences in a depopulated space.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this topic of chinophobia and some other related terms.
Speaker 1: I figure a good place to start on all of
Speaker 1: this might be to return to cinema. We talked a
Speaker 1: little bit about cinema earlier in this journey, and in fact,
Speaker 1: we talked about the nineteen seventy seven Dario Argento horror
Speaker 1: classic Suspiria, and there's a scene in that film that
Speaker 1: instantly came to mind when I was thinking about this fear,
Speaker 1: this horror associated with depopulated spaces. Like you're saying, and
Speaker 1: if you've seen Suspiria the original, though I really like
Speaker 1: the remake as well, and I don't think they recreated
Speaker 1: this scene in the remake, but I could be wrong.
Speaker 1: This scene involves a blind man walking through an open,
Speaker 1: unoccupied city plaza at night. There are no other human
Speaker 1: beings in sight, the environment is pretty well illuminated, though
Speaker 1: there are still some deep pockets of shadow. There's a
Speaker 1: growing sense of threat and terror and eventually, and I
Speaker 1: think we get some very wide shots here too to
Speaker 1: really take in all that space, and then as the
Speaker 1: tension builds, the dog begins to bark, and in a
Speaker 1: nasty twist, because again this is a Gilat film and
Speaker 1: they're often nasty, the dog turns on the blind man
Speaker 1: and kills him. But the way the scene builds up
Speaker 1: to that moment takes just full advantage of this very
Speaker 1: open space, this feeling that there's just something wrong in
Speaker 1: the openness of all of this, that there's just this
Speaker 1: one individual and his dog out here and something terrible
Speaker 1: is about to happen.
Speaker 3: I think this scene is a fantastic example, especially because
Speaker 3: of how different it is than than most of most
Speaker 3: of Suspiria and most of other you know, Italian horror
Speaker 3: films or Gallo films, which we noted in the first
Speaker 3: episode in the series are They are often recognized for
Speaker 3: being especially visually busy, you know, they have that artistic
Speaker 3: sense of horror vacui, as in, you sense a desire
Speaker 3: to fill in all empti or uniform spaces with detail
Speaker 3: and richness and stuff. You know, they're full of patterns,
Speaker 3: and so I think the scene of you know, the
Speaker 3: man who is unfortunately cursed by the witches and then
Speaker 3: this attack happens on him. It gets especially scary because
Speaker 3: it's so unlike the rest of the movie, having all
Speaker 3: this emptiness and blank space in the night. But I
Speaker 3: was thinking about this and about how the horror genre
Speaker 3: in particular tends to favor blank, vacant, empty locations in
Speaker 3: multiple ways. So one way is that they tend to
Speaker 3: favor settings that are like literally emptied in the narrative sense.
Speaker 3: They are literally emptied of human activity or neglected by
Speaker 3: humans in some way. So think of how much horror
Speaker 3: loves like abandoned or empty buildings and settlements. Maybe the
Speaker 3: first idea that comes to my mind is Dracula's Castle,
Speaker 3: which is interesting because it is a castle that has
Speaker 3: no servants bustling about, no courtiers, just empty halls and chambers,
Speaker 3: and then the solitary figure of Dracula himself as the host.
Speaker 3: It's kind of like a like a Where's Waldo, except
Speaker 3: there's just one guy there on the page and he's
Speaker 3: really staring at your neck.
Speaker 1: Oh man, that would be a great twist, and a
Speaker 1: Where's Waldo book? Where's Dracula? And each page is a
Speaker 1: massive level of Dracula's castle and there's just Dracula.
Speaker 3: There's nothing there. It's just him. There are no other Waldos.
Speaker 3: By the way, this reminds me of one of my
Speaker 3: favorite scenes in the movie Shadow of the Vampire from
Speaker 3: the year two thousand, which stars It's a sort of
Speaker 3: a horror comedy about the making of the movie nos Ferratu,
Speaker 3: but it says that Max Shrek, the actor who plays
Speaker 3: no s Faratu in the movie played by Willem Dafoe
Speaker 3: in this movie, was actually a vampire. That is what
Speaker 3: it assumes, and it's kind of a great premise. And
Speaker 3: there's a moment where they ask the character, who is
Speaker 3: in this telling a real vampire, if he read the
Speaker 3: novel Dracula. He says yes. He says the novel made
Speaker 3: him sad, and they said why and he says, because
Speaker 3: Dracula had no servants.
Speaker 1: I forgot about that part.
Speaker 3: That's good, but it is kind of sad, isn't it,
Speaker 3: Like the when when Harker in the novel realizes that
Speaker 3: like it was the count himself who had to set
Speaker 3: out the meal for him and so forth. There's something
Speaker 3: kind of like, not like I want vampires to have servants,
Speaker 3: but I don't know. There's something kind of lonely and
Speaker 3: uneasy about it, And I think it has a lot
Speaker 3: to do with the fact that it's in a castle.
Speaker 3: It's in this big space meant to be occupied by
Speaker 3: many people, but he's the only one there. I mean,
Speaker 3: I guess later we find out there's some other you know,
Speaker 3: ghoul type creatures, but at first it's just empty except
Speaker 3: for him. But think of other movies with just abandoned locations,
Speaker 3: ghost towns, abandoned settlements, you know, empty empty streets and
Speaker 3: other places at night and so forth. Rob, I'm not
Speaker 3: sure if you've noticed the same thing, but it strikes
Speaker 3: me that horror movies especially favor locations that are not
Speaker 3: just empty as a matter of course, like you'd expect
Speaker 3: them to be empty, but locations that are empty in
Speaker 3: contrast to how we usually see them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is often played a great effect,
Speaker 1: and various ghost towns in your westerns and of course
Speaker 1: depopulated cities, like it's not enough to just replace the
Speaker 1: you know, you get into like post apocalyptic scenarios where
Speaker 1: there's like destroyed cities and bodies and so forth, and yes, zombies,
Speaker 1: but that doesn't mean you're necessarily going for this total
Speaker 1: feeling of emptiness this sense that all the activity and
Speaker 1: presence of it was there previously is just gone. But
Speaker 1: one example that does come to mind, and this is
Speaker 1: a zombie film, but twenty eight days Later, of course,
Speaker 1: that's all those wonderful shots of what depopulated London and
Speaker 1: our character walking around there and sort of experiencing just
Speaker 1: the overwhelming emptiness of the city.
Speaker 3: I think that's a great example. It's incredibly unnerving that opening.
Speaker 3: So you could contrast that with like say a movie
Speaker 3: with scenes in a desert or a forest wilderness, which
Speaker 3: might be empty of human activity, but we would expect
Speaker 3: them to be empty of human activity. And in cases
Speaker 3: where movies focus on that, in the horror genre, at least,
Speaker 3: the horror usually comes from when you find something or someone,
Speaker 3: or suspect the presence of something or someone that you
Speaker 3: wouldn't usually expect to encounter there. Instead, locations that I
Speaker 3: think of as most common to horror movies are like
Speaker 3: empty versions of places you would usually expect to be full.
Speaker 3: So not just cities like at the beginning of twenty
Speaker 3: eight Days Later, but think of empty hospitals at the
Speaker 3: night shift, empty churches and cathedrals, where's the congregation empty
Speaker 3: school buildings after hours, empty empty castles. Like I said
Speaker 3: at the beginning, you know what happened to the crew
Speaker 3: of the event Horizon? Why is this spaceship empty? So
Speaker 3: I think empty locations like this lend themselves well to
Speaker 3: horror for multiple reasons. One is a kind of just
Speaker 3: like literal understanding of danger in the world. Like, you know,
Speaker 3: there's an uneasiness that comes from a location being empty,
Speaker 3: because it sort of me like you're on your own
Speaker 3: against whatever might threaten you. But if for the locations
Speaker 3: full of people, you might be able to get help
Speaker 3: from the werewolf if it's going to come at you,
Speaker 3: Like people usually feel safer in numbers for totally good
Speaker 3: and logical reasons.
Speaker 1: You know two examples that come to mind. They're very
Speaker 1: related because they both involve the same sort of location.
Speaker 1: I think both of these examples kind of maybe you know,
Speaker 1: bend this line a little bit and blurred the distinction
Speaker 1: between emptiness being invigorating and empowering and it being terrifying.
Speaker 1: They both take place in shopping malls, and of course
Speaker 1: thinking about Donna the Dead from George Romero and Shopping Mall,
Speaker 1: both films in which our characters find themselves in a
Speaker 1: depopulated mall shopping mall environment, and eventually they're gonna have
Speaker 1: to deal with of course zombies in one film, and
Speaker 1: well and also like evil bikers in one film, but
Speaker 1: then in the other film theyre can have to deal
Speaker 1: with killer robots. And in both of these there's kind
Speaker 1: of like this I don't know, this kind of I
Speaker 1: guess capitalist rebellion in energy to them, where it's like
Speaker 1: this place that contained me through commerce and also just
Speaker 1: the social environment of the mall. Now those constraints are
Speaker 1: not there, and I can just go into any store
Speaker 1: in the mall and steal things. But then on the
Speaker 1: other hand, yes, it's like all the things that made
Speaker 1: this a normal place, that made this a cathedral of
Speaker 1: American culture during the nineteen eighties or what have you,
Speaker 1: that's gone as well. There's something unholy about the environment.
Speaker 3: That's great observation. Yeah, about the malls in these movies,
Speaker 3: it's like the fact that we see them with all
Speaker 3: of the people taken out of them, not shopping anymore,
Speaker 3: just automatically invites questions, kind of critical questions about what
Speaker 3: this place was for in the first place and what
Speaker 3: it meant. Yeah, and of course. Yeah, it invites that
Speaker 3: uneasy feeling, and I think that goes to the next thing.
Speaker 3: So there was the thing I already said about empty locations,
Speaker 3: or in a very literal sense, they're scarier just because
Speaker 3: like there's safety in numbers, but empty locations and abandoned
Speaker 3: the locations I think are also good fodder for horror
Speaker 3: on a conceptual level because in some cases they invite
Speaker 3: you to wonder why the place is empty, like what
Speaker 3: happened here? Where did the people go? Or as you
Speaker 3: just said, they invite you to sort of look upon
Speaker 3: the purpose of the place with a newly critical eye,
Speaker 3: like when people are not doing the things they're normally
Speaker 3: doing in this place, what is this place actually form?
Speaker 1: Yeah, we just got some of that in our and
Speaker 1: you alluded to this a little bit already. But the
Speaker 1: episodes that we did about Christmas ghost stories, yes from
Speaker 1: Northern Europe, that deal with this whole question, like what
Speaker 1: is a church if it is midnight and no one
Speaker 1: is there, Like is it still a church? And if
Speaker 1: it is still a church, what does that mean?
Speaker 3: Is it still sacred or does the sacredness come from
Speaker 3: the you know, the congregation and the acts they do
Speaker 3: inside it, and so could the same building the church
Speaker 3: be used for unholy rites. But finally, I think there
Speaker 3: are also conceptual suggestions, like a place that is empty
Speaker 3: in contrast to the expectation that it should be full,
Speaker 3: like all of these depopulated places we've been talking about
Speaker 3: that has long been associated with death, right like you
Speaker 3: would think under normal old ideas like humans have left
Speaker 3: this formerly inhabited place, like a soul leaving a body.
Speaker 3: But in addition to all these more literal concerns, I
Speaker 3: think horror films in particular, but other genres as well,
Speaker 3: often use blank space also known as negative space, in
Speaker 3: the frame of the film as a visual marker to
Speaker 3: create uneasiness. So this is less literal about like what
Speaker 3: is threatening the characters, and more just kind of the
Speaker 3: feelings that we get from how a movie looks. I
Speaker 3: don't know how much of this is a natural secological
Speaker 3: expectation that humans have and how much is just sort
Speaker 3: of a like a learned convention emergent convention of filmmaking
Speaker 3: that we have all learned implicitly from watching movies. But
Speaker 3: I think the baseline fact is that when we see
Speaker 3: negative space in a movie, we somewhat expect it to
Speaker 3: become filled. There's empty space on the screen. We expect
Speaker 3: something to come to occupy that space, and of course,
Speaker 3: once you have expectation, you have the ability to create tension,
Speaker 3: and by denying the fulfillment of that expectation, like you know,
Speaker 3: like a character peers out into the darkness and it's
Speaker 3: uniform darkness, not filled in with detail, there's no detail,
Speaker 3: or they look into an empty room with nothing in it,
Speaker 3: or some other negative space. We expect something to happen,
Speaker 3: something to fill that space or to come into view,
Speaker 3: and if it doesn't, that is unresolved tension and uneasiness
Speaker 3: and the sort of the prime example, like one of
Speaker 3: the core feelings that is evoked by weird fiction and cinema.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, And I think a great recent example of
Speaker 1: all this would be Jordan Peele's Note that came out
Speaker 1: just last year. I'm not going to do any spoilers
Speaker 1: for it because I don't think you've seen it.
Speaker 3: Yet, have you? I still haven't, no, okay, and I.
Speaker 1: Know a lot of listeners haven't, so I'm not going
Speaker 1: to spoil it. But I will say that there are
Speaker 1: a lot of shots that established the sky as the
Speaker 1: domain of some manner of inhuman threat. And then below
Speaker 1: beneath the sky you have this wonderful California desert setting
Speaker 1: as well, so it's very geographically open. But then you
Speaker 1: have this open sky, you also have some wonderful clouds
Speaker 1: at play, both during the daytime sequences and the nighttime sequences.
Speaker 1: But still it does this fabulous job of establishing a
Speaker 1: cloudy or even open sky as being possibly a threat.
Speaker 1: And I found that when I watched it in the theater.
Speaker 1: When I left the theater, when I left the dark
Speaker 1: theater and went out into the day, because it was
Speaker 1: a matinee that I attended, instantly I kind of felt
Speaker 1: in danger. I kind of felt some of the danger
Speaker 1: from the film still, like residually coursing through my body
Speaker 1: to where I was like, let's go ahead and get
Speaker 1: to the car. I don't want to. I don't feel
Speaker 1: great walking across this this wide open parking lot beneath
Speaker 1: this the scary sky.
Speaker 3: Oh boy. Well, I will admit that when I come
Speaker 3: out of a matinee, I often feel uneasy. Uh, No
Speaker 3: matter what the movie was, there's just something weird about
Speaker 3: coming out of a darkened movie. Theater and it's still
Speaker 3: light outside.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's like all the world is what's going on?
Speaker 3: Yeah? True. It kind of reminds me of that feeling
Speaker 3: like when you take too long of a nap in
Speaker 3: the middle of the day.
Speaker 1: It's like, yeah, it's disorienting you. You've been in a
Speaker 1: cave watching a cinema and then then you go out
Speaker 1: into the real world. Now, in thinking about how Note
Speaker 1: made me temporarily feel about open skies, I did find
Speaker 1: it interesting to come across various mentions of a supposed
Speaker 1: phobia online dubbed cassidastrophobia, which is described as a fear
Speaker 1: of essentially falling up into the sky. Now. I couldn't
Speaker 1: find any academic discussion of this alleged phobia, and I'm
Speaker 1: not doubting anyone's experiences around it, because for starters, there's
Speaker 1: plenty of room for anxiety and paranoia to creep up
Speaker 1: in one's experience of reality. It may simply just be
Speaker 1: newly defined and understudied, but to whatever extent it's an
Speaker 1: actual phobia, it would seem to be kind of a
Speaker 1: subset of this idea of chinophobia pronounce fear of the
Speaker 1: open you a feeling that this open sky might either
Speaker 1: swallow you up or somehow gravity is going to fail
Speaker 1: and you'll float up into it.
Speaker 3: That is an interesting fear because it doesn't correspond to
Speaker 3: anything that I can think of that ever happens in reality,
Speaker 3: and it's very specific.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it's interesting because I can kind of relate
Speaker 1: to these overwhelming feelings of viewing either a clear blue
Speaker 1: sky in the day or certainly a sprawling starscape and
Speaker 1: a rural environment where you're free of light pollution and
Speaker 1: cloud cover and everything's really expansive and it But it's
Speaker 1: also it's weird because these are both vistas that can
Speaker 1: be very inspiring and beautiful but can maybe reach the
Speaker 1: point of being overwhelming, and maybe it ends up having
Speaker 1: this effect where you think about what would happen if I, like,
Speaker 1: what if I just fell up into it? And it
Speaker 1: doesn't make any sense. Nobody's like, this is not going
Speaker 1: to happen. You have you have a number of other
Speaker 1: concerns if gravity stops working, besides you know where you're
Speaker 1: going to float to. But but yeah, I can I
Speaker 1: can sort of look back on times in my life
Speaker 1: where I've been looking up at like a big, clear
Speaker 1: blue sky or some sort of a starscape and feeling this,
Speaker 1: especially with the Blue Sky. I think there are times
Speaker 1: where I looked up at the starscape and I was
Speaker 1: maybe a little afraid of aliens more than I was
Speaker 1: afraid of just falling up into the blue.
Speaker 3: Were you afraid of aliens because you watched Unsolved Mysteries
Speaker 3: and they had the scary sitg Yes.
Speaker 1: As a child, I was. I was afraid of it,
Speaker 1: afraid of aliens because there was no counter narrative. I
Speaker 1: think of discusses on the show before you would just
Speaker 1: encounter this this episode or episodes of Unsolved Mysteries and
Speaker 1: they're like, yep, there might be aliens out there. It
Speaker 1: seems like there's good evidence for it. I don't know.
Speaker 1: And you didn't have Carl Sagan coming on afterwards and
Speaker 1: explaining all the reasons why you shouldn't be worried.
Speaker 3: That would be hilarious. Each episode ends with like a
Speaker 3: formal debate between Robert Stack and Carl c.
Speaker 1: Yeah. But with the Blue it's hard to say. It's
Speaker 1: just at times I felt kind of an unnerving sense
Speaker 1: when there was like this really big blue sky. I
Speaker 1: don't know, I'll get back to this, but it also
Speaker 1: I went on a tangent here where I was reminded
Speaker 1: of something that Geraldine Pinch discusses in her book Egyptian
Speaker 1: Mythology about how the cloudless skies above ancient Egypt would
Speaker 1: have provided ready viewing of the stars and planets, thus
Speaker 1: instilling a great interest in the movement of the heavens
Speaker 1: in Egyptian Mythology. And I wasn't able to find a
Speaker 1: satisfying answer on this, but I mean, this definitely seems
Speaker 1: to be the case with the ancient Egyptians. But the
Speaker 1: ancient Egyptians were not the only people to find the
Speaker 1: sky very interesting. They weren't the only ones to have
Speaker 1: an advanced astronomy. I mean, you look at various examples
Speaker 1: from the ancient world, the Babylonians, the Greeks, India, China, Persia,
Speaker 1: the Mayans. They all had robust astronomical systems. And there
Speaker 1: are disciplines that look into this sort of question, like
Speaker 1: how did the perception of the sky and the understanding
Speaker 1: of the cosmos and the movements of the stars. More specifically,
Speaker 1: like how did this affect a given civilization and their
Speaker 1: beliefs and their views. You have the disciplines of archaeo
Speaker 1: astronomy and ethno astrology. And there's a lot of interesting
Speaker 1: work out there concerning, say, for example, certain architectural traditions
Speaker 1: and to what extent they were created with astronomy astronomical
Speaker 1: data in mind.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, I see like buildings that may or may
Speaker 3: not have been intended to align with the stars in
Speaker 3: a certain way.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And so what I guess I was curious about was, Okay,
Speaker 1: does this mean that are you going to have certain
Speaker 1: civilizations located in regions or with high population density and
Speaker 1: regions that had maybe more unbstructed views of the night sky,
Speaker 1: would they lean towards a more robust astronomical culture or something.
Speaker 1: I didn't encounter much to really back that up. You know,
Speaker 1: there wasn't much that I was encountering that said that
Speaker 1: there's any kind of like astrophilic or astrophobic division between
Speaker 1: cultures or anything not that I could tell. If it's
Speaker 1: out there and I missed it, and you know about it, listeners,
Speaker 1: write in and let me know. But more often you
Speaker 1: seem to see this mix related to astronomical traditions that
Speaker 1: where a culture, a civilization realizes that okay, you know,
Speaker 1: the trackable movement of the sun and the stars is
Speaker 1: linked to various cycles of life, the passage of time,
Speaker 1: I am, the seasons, navigation, and then you also have
Speaker 1: purely supernatural concepts such as omens and portents and looking
Speaker 1: to the stars to try and divine the future, and
Speaker 1: looking for yeah, individual data, data about the individual experience
Speaker 1: in the heavens, alongside broader information about how life works
Speaker 1: in the long term on Earth. So within a given
Speaker 1: astronomical culture, there might be a number of important but
Speaker 1: kind of mundane considerations about the sky, alongside lofty religious,
Speaker 1: cosmological ideas and negative superstitions concerning certain anomalies such as say, eclipses,
Speaker 1: which we've discussed in the show before, as well as
Speaker 1: things that these certain lunar phases and other things that
Speaker 1: might in some cases might be out of the ordinary
Speaker 1: or somehow novel, but.
Speaker 3: Being anomalies, these would probably not be things where the
Speaker 3: source of the anxiety is anything you could identify as
Speaker 3: like fear of the openness of the sky.
Speaker 1: Right right, Yeah, it's more you read about, you know,
Speaker 1: some of these eclipse myths and all there are fear
Speaker 1: based interpretations of them and myths involving them. Some sort
Speaker 1: of monster threatening reality and so forth. But then on
Speaker 1: the other side, you have, even though they may seem
Speaker 1: like strange anomalies out of nowhere to some observers, and
Speaker 1: perhaps at sometimes you're still going to have astronomy get
Speaker 1: on top of that, as we discussed in those episodes
Speaker 1: we did on Eclipse Myths, and people begin to realize, Okay,
Speaker 1: these things are trackable, and we can tell when they
Speaker 1: will occur, or we can predict them. Now. Within the
Speaker 1: context of horror, this idea of fearing the sky, fearing
Speaker 1: big open places, it does line up not only thematically
Speaker 1: but specifically with the twentieth century writings of HP love Draft.
Speaker 1: I was looking around, and you know, I don't think
Speaker 1: I don't remember reading this story, but there's a nineteen
Speaker 1: twenty one story titled The Other Gods, and there's this
Speaker 1: bit in it where the character who's I'm sure clearly
Speaker 1: going mad thinking about, you know, some sort of monstrous
Speaker 1: reality all around him, exclaims the other gods, the other gods,
Speaker 1: the gods of the auber hells that guard the feeble
Speaker 1: gods of Earth. Look away, go back, do not see,
Speaker 1: do not see the vengeance of the infinite abysses, that cursed,
Speaker 1: that damnable pit, merciful gods of Earth. I am falling
Speaker 1: into the sky.
Speaker 3: Ah yeah, Well, that kind of fear does seem to
Speaker 3: fit into the probably not just Lovecraft, but you could
Speaker 3: say the broader convention of cosmic horror, which you know,
Speaker 3: is horror that has a lot to do not just
Speaker 3: with like specific threats to the individual characters, but a
Speaker 3: kind of terror at the idea of the insignificance of
Speaker 3: human mind when compared to some kind of greater force
Speaker 3: or greater meaninglessness in the cosmos as a whole. And
Speaker 3: one way you could really imagine that that sort of
Speaker 3: absurdity or meaninglessness being highlighted is just like, I don't know,
Speaker 3: capricious violations of the laws of physics. Suddenly you fall
Speaker 3: up instead of down.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, There's there's a lot of that in
Speaker 1: the weird fiction world, and a lot of this is
Speaker 1: described as being in line with the literary philosophy of cosmicism,
Speaker 1: which is this idea that, yeah, the universe is just
Speaker 1: teeming with alien threats, monster gods from space. But also
Speaker 1: it's related to this fear regarding humanity seemingly inconsequential place
Speaker 1: in a vast and alien universe. And I think this
Speaker 1: is often you know, you often see this emerging in
Speaker 1: a context of our increasing scientific understanding of who we
Speaker 1: are and what the planet is, and you know, getting
Speaker 1: away from these older ideas about and also religious ideas
Speaker 1: about the importance of Earth, the importance of humanity, and
Speaker 1: then what are you left with, or at least what
Speaker 1: are you left with maybe in your darker moments or
Speaker 1: in your moments of doubt.
Speaker 3: Right, I mean it's sort of the antisocial side of
Speaker 3: the Copernican principle. Yeah, so like, yeah, I don't think
Speaker 3: the Compernitan principle, like the fact that you should not
Speaker 3: assume that you are looking at the universe from a
Speaker 3: privileged place or that you are the center of the universe. Instead,
Speaker 3: you should assume you are looking at the universe from
Speaker 3: an average place within the universe. And of course that
Speaker 3: goes along with our discovery of you know, the Earth
Speaker 3: and not being the center of the Solar system and
Speaker 3: so forth. I think that's just a fact of life,
Speaker 3: and that is a good way to look at the universe.
Speaker 3: One need not feel despairing about it, but if one
Speaker 3: chooses to feel despairing about that realization, you kind of
Speaker 3: end up in the cosmic horror area.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and in the case of Lovecraft in particular, perhaps
Speaker 1: related authors as well. You're not just dealing with this
Speaker 1: fear of cosmic insignificance either. You know, you also have
Speaker 1: to throw in there a healthy dose of misanthropy, of
Speaker 1: xenophobia and so forth. So put that all in the
Speaker 1: stew together and you know, a lot of horror can emerge.
Speaker 1: But also, yeah, this this feeling that maybe nothing matters.
Speaker 1: But a lot of this, I think, this thinking about
Speaker 1: the sky and the feeling about these these perhaps fears
Speaker 1: of falling into the sky. And maybe they're not like,
Speaker 1: you know, a literal fear like oh I better hold
Speaker 1: onto the grass, but just this sort of overwhelming sense
Speaker 1: of the vast. I think a lot of it does
Speaker 1: come back to what we discussed earlier, this connection between
Speaker 1: the infinite and the finite, between how this do is
Speaker 1: of great expanse can affect us. So to one line
Speaker 1: of thinking, clear of the blue sky might be relaxing
Speaker 1: and a brilliant starscape inspiring, but to others this could
Speaker 1: certainly be overpower, perhaps bringing out feelings of vulnerability and insignificance.
Speaker 3: Yes, certainly. And this comes back to something we talked
Speaker 3: about a couple of episodes ago about like the difference
Speaker 3: in art styles that people use to create sacred or
Speaker 3: RESTful or contemplative spaces in different environments, and how it's
Speaker 3: not clear that there's always a correlation in this direction,
Speaker 3: but it's possible that you could have trends where people
Speaker 3: who spend more of their time in a kind of
Speaker 3: like a busy environment might be more inclined to have
Speaker 3: their sacred or RESTful or contemplative spaces decorated in a
Speaker 3: minimalist way that has more blankness, more uniformity of color,
Speaker 3: and things like that, whereas people who live in more
Speaker 3: pastoral environments might be more attracted to sacred, RESTful or
Speaker 3: contemplative spaces that are full of rich detail. And the
Speaker 3: example was Tibetan art.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, so I think I think all of that
Speaker 1: applies here as well. Again, this becomes so subjective depending
Speaker 1: on where one's head is, and you know what you're
Speaker 1: thinking about, and then suddenly you encounter, say a wide
Speaker 1: open space or an enclosed space, and then how does
Speaker 1: that affect how you're feeling?
Speaker 3: Now?
Speaker 1: I was looking around for other other sources commenting on
Speaker 1: some of this, and I did find a very interesting
Speaker 1: paper by doctor Francisco Matta. The paper's titled A Phenomenological
Speaker 1: Investigation of the presencing of Space, and this was is
Speaker 1: an interesting paper. You can find it online and read
Speaker 1: it for free off it interests you. But I just
Speaker 1: want to read one quote from it that kind of
Speaker 1: gets down to what we're talking about here. Quote. However,
Speaker 1: this search for freedom or empowerment can be frightening. Whenever
Speaker 1: one is searching for what we used to call a
Speaker 1: horizontality and puts oneself in situations in which one may
Speaker 1: perceive larger volumes of space, one runs the risk of
Speaker 1: losing sight of the limits of such a volume, in
Speaker 1: which case one will likely feel chinophobic. One may have
Speaker 1: this fearful experience since one has no anchors of reference,
Speaker 1: and therefore one is unable to become aware of any
Speaker 1: volume of space. For example, when out at sea, departing
Speaker 1: from the coastline and heading farther and farther into the ocean,
Speaker 1: one comes to be in the midst of a vast
Speaker 1: extension of limitless water. Kinophobia is, in fact the opposite
Speaker 1: of being placed the being at home that comes with topophilia.
Speaker 1: So that's interesting. I like that explanation a lot, this
Speaker 1: feeling of that you could be hit with that. Again,
Speaker 1: this is highly subjective, but you encounter this vast expanse
Speaker 1: of ocean or sky or desert, and you lose sight
Speaker 1: of the limits, and you might think, well, you know,
Speaker 1: I have no place here, I have no belonging here.
Speaker 1: This is the overwhelming scope of the world kind of
Speaker 1: unhinges me from that that spatial sense of belonging. All right,
Speaker 1: looks like we've gone the limit here, were late for
Speaker 1: the sky, So we're gonna go ahead and close it out.
Speaker 1: But we'd love to hear from everyone out there if
Speaker 1: you have thoughts and reflections on all this. I'd especially
Speaker 1: love to hear from anyone out there who's had a
Speaker 1: similar or conflicting reaction to say, a very open blue
Speaker 1: sky or a very open starvest at night. Be interesting
Speaker 1: to continue to discuss this on our listener Mail episodes.
Speaker 1: Our listener Mail episodes of course published on Mondays in
Speaker 1: the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed. Our Core
Speaker 1: Science episodes are on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Short Form Monster
Speaker 1: Fact on Wednesdays, and then on Fridays we set aside
Speaker 1: most serious concerns and just talk about a strange film
Speaker 1: on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 3: Huge thanks to our audio producer JJ Posway. If you
Speaker 3: would like to get in touch with us with feedback
Speaker 3: on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic
Speaker 3: for the future, or just to say hello, you can
Speaker 3: email ail us at contact at stuff to Blow your
Speaker 3: Mind dot com.
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