That got kind of increasingly oddly specific the longer it went on.
This is probably less accurate to Lovecraft’s intent, but I like to think of “cosmic horrors” as being more literal. The universe, by and large, does not care about life - and the fact that it continues to exist at all, let alone so peacefully, is largely just chance or luck. It’s almost absurd that we go about our lives so mundanely, given how chaotic and inhospitable the universe at large largely is.
Events at scales large enough to completely destroy Earth’s biosphere happen on the regular and without reason in the universe. The Earth doesn’t “owe” us a stable and habitable environment, it just happens to have one largely by chance - one cosmic catastrophe and we’re out. One collision of sufficient size, or nearby supernova, or gamma ray burst aimed right at us, or front of vacuum decay, or solar superflare. A rogue planet could pass near our solar system at an odd angle and destabilize our orbit (or those of millions of asteroids).
Even our own actions - man-made climate change and ocean acidification could trigger a phytoplankton die-off, disrupting the global oxygen cycle, slowly suffocating most life over a span of decades. Or we could pass a tipping point and actually have Earth’s biosphere run away into a Venus-like state, no longer habitable at all (there’s on the order of 10x-50x more methane trapped in polar ice, than is in the entire atmosphere). A supervolcano could erupt today and send us into a decade-plus of freezing temperatures, famine, and overall civilization-collapsing conditions.
And in the very long term, an end of this nature is completely guaranteed. Life on Earth will one day end, because we’re entirely dependent on the sun - one of those unfathomably large and powerful cosmic entities that could, at any point, destroy us or our civilization with a single random event. We’re just a lucky ant on the cosmic dance floor that hasn’t been stepped on. Yet.
That got kind of increasingly oddly specific the longer it went on.
This is probably less accurate to Lovecraft’s intent, but I like to think of “cosmic horrors” as being more literal. The universe, by and large, does not care about life - and the fact that it continues to exist at all, let alone so peacefully, is largely just chance or luck. It’s almost absurd that we go about our lives so mundanely, given how chaotic and inhospitable the universe at large largely is.
Events at scales large enough to completely destroy Earth’s biosphere happen on the regular and without reason in the universe. The Earth doesn’t “owe” us a stable and habitable environment, it just happens to have one largely by chance - one cosmic catastrophe and we’re out. One collision of sufficient size, or nearby supernova, or gamma ray burst aimed right at us, or front of vacuum decay, or solar superflare. A rogue planet could pass near our solar system at an odd angle and destabilize our orbit (or those of millions of asteroids).
Even our own actions - man-made climate change and ocean acidification could trigger a phytoplankton die-off, disrupting the global oxygen cycle, slowly suffocating most life over a span of decades. Or we could pass a tipping point and actually have Earth’s biosphere run away into a Venus-like state, no longer habitable at all (there’s on the order of 10x-50x more methane trapped in polar ice, than is in the entire atmosphere). A supervolcano could erupt today and send us into a decade-plus of freezing temperatures, famine, and overall civilization-collapsing conditions.
And in the very long term, an end of this nature is completely guaranteed. Life on Earth will one day end, because we’re entirely dependent on the sun - one of those unfathomably large and powerful cosmic entities that could, at any point, destroy us or our civilization with a single random event. We’re just a lucky ant on the cosmic dance floor that hasn’t been stepped on. Yet.
Ok, now read that in Stephen Fry’s voice.