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Comment by zitterbewegung | Hacker News Reader

I don’t think that’s true since we have only recently figured out what stars really are (last 2 thousand years) .

Whether it be the sun, the moon, or the stars and regardless of what we thought we were seeing, when we looked up in the sky we saw things we could not reach that fueled our imagination and our desire for exploration.

A subsurface dweller would always see and feel physical bounds and would probably assume that's all there was to it.

Yeah, I doubt upon discovering a wider universe most beings are going to follow the path of the Krikket in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Otherwise every discovery would have the potential to discombobulate them under the right circumstances.

Humanity often has periods of instability following major discoveries that unseat orthodox ideals. An argument can be made that much of the cultural instability in the modern US and its animosity to science can be rooted in an "allergic" reaction to the ideas of evolution and a greater understanding of just how old and vast our universe actually is.

Personally, such an argument would be a bit simplistic, but you'd be a fool to ignore how discombobulating evolution has been to much of Evangelical America. People who believe they are the center of universe tend to find it difficult to accept evidence to the contrary. To use another literary reference, there are a lot of warty bliggens in the world.

Well going even beyond that. There's entire populations of people barely living above the stone age, not to mention uncontacted tribes still out there in the world. It provides a fascinating spectrum of experiences.

I guess my point is any large enough group of beings will have a variety of responses ranging from embracing new ideas and information wholeheartedly or rejecting them out of fear and ignorance and every possible combination of response in between. And it can be tricky to figure out which sub-group should represent the whole in these sort of blanket statements about how "they" would "feel" about an arbitrary bit of knowledge that they couldn't have foreseen discovering.

Well, that is rather the idea in The Killing Star. Also The Dark Forest by Liu Cixin.

Also the classic 1941 short story “Nightfall” by Asimov. Aliens live on a world that is part of a complex solar system orbiting multiple stars, so it’s only nighttime once every two thousand years. At that point, the civilizations look up at the dark sky, perceive that there are many other stars, which shocks them with the enormity of the universe and how small and insignificant they are, and...well, it doesn’t go very well.

EDIT: It’s online! http://www.astro.sunysb.edu/fwalter/AST389/TEXTS/Nightfall.h...

Wasn't that an allegory for the spread of Nazism?

It blows my mind that we didn't confirm the existence of other galaxies until the 1920s.

It was less than a century ago that we learned that the universe was a hundred billion times more complex than we thought it was.

Imagine what we don't know now.

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