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Comment by astatine | Hacker News Reader

Off-topic, but does anyone else feel claustrophobic when reading about the vastness of the universe? I enjoy astronomy related topics but when reading articles about the scale or the expansion of the universe, etc I start feeling physically uncomfortable and need to take a break.

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Try and "step back" and observe the universe observing itself through your mind. Your "you" is local chunk of universe coded with a capacity to consider the smallest and largest scales of itself. Your mind can easily encompass the universe in thought, summing up everything known as easily as you take a breath. It's an incredible ability, cherish it!

I try to explain this to people all the time, especially on topics like panpsychism.

Is the universe conscious? Well, parts of it certainly are! And those parts are learning about itself as a whole.

This reminds me of a physics teacher I had in elementary school:

-But is there anything faster than light?

-??? ...

-Yes! Our thoughts. In my thoughts I can be on the moon instantly.

Elementary school physics classes?

... on Earth?

Denmark, in the 1960s. Elementary school grade 1 to 7, no kindergarten.

Yesssss! An amazingly small skin of matter (folds in spacetime) on this rock floating in space has geometry encoded with information about the deepest pores of subatomic reality, the massive scales of space and time above and beyond ourselves. It's pretty fucking incredible. [EDIT: You are a small entry lane in a highway interchange in the universe, that is the busiest fucking information nexus in the observable universe.]

You might feel like you're a speck floating above kilometers of deep dark ocean, but that's just your matter. If you think about your (our!) information, we're almost more like the water itself in our permeance -- or like some sort of aerogel -- compared to anything else floating in this thing :)

I can recommend Universal Paperclips as treatment. You start making paperclips by hand and end by converting the entire universe into paperclips. The universe seems big until that counter at the bottom of your screen says "0.0000000001% explored" and starts rapidly going up.

Not being dismissive but a serious answer: go outside? Walk a trail? Just do something to get out of your head. Maybe then you could consume some audio content about astronomy without feeling overwhelmed (or just find a place to read outside).

I get the sense that being in a room (which is always pretty small) makes the abstract claustrophobia feel more real.

Initially Reading your comment I thought not claustrophobic but I really identify with the last part of your description “physically uncomfortable.”

Truth is I have never been able to describe that particular physical feeling, so maybe claustrophobic is not exact but perhaps a similar type of physical sensation/experience.

For me it’s actually very difficult to put myself in that state, it’s somewhere between extremely deep thought and meditation...I’ll go so far as to say even things I don’t necessarily believe in such as remote viewing and/or some type of outer body experience.

I’ll also add that while it’s not something I actively practice by any means ( and I otherwise engage in breathing exercises/meditation - mostly to help my running) I really like that uneasy feeling and find I can only maintain it for short periods.

I always keep this diagram of the scales of universe [1] close at hand. It feels liberating to look at it when I feel overwhelmed. To me, it shows that it is completely preposterous to worry about.. anything, really. The Earth is negligible.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Location_of_Earth_(9x1-En...

Claustrophobic as for being afraid closed space? Universe produces exactly opposite effect on me - head-spinning feeling of a tiny speck floating in the turbulent never-ending massive storm of gigantic proportions, at mercy of titanic forces all around. Kind of vertigo when standing on the edge of the roof of super-tall building, looking down, and barely seeing the ground below, and open air all around.

It is always a very humbling sensation, which is good. No place for arrogance when you are nothing and mean nothing from certain scale of things.

> The Total Perspective Vortex was a machine built with the intention of showing beings the infinity of creation, which became used as a method of torture.

https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Total_Perspective_Vortex

Do you mean agoraphobic?

I think it can be re-framed like a feeling of freedom and possibility. For instance, if you managed to live one million years and visit all the galaxy, you would have not even started.

There isn't really any sort of distinct boundary between "you" and the "rest" of the universe.

I used to believe this, but it turns out not to be true, and in a very profound way. If you're a living thing, i.e. a self-reproducing system, then you have no choice but to draw some sort of boundary around yourself, i.e. the system that is doing the reproducing, and the "rest of the universe" which contains the resources you need to exploit in order to reproduce. These boundaries are manifest at multiple layers of abstraction: the membrane around the cell nucleus in eukaryotes, cell walls, your skin, families, species, city-states, nation-states. The boundaries may not be "distinct", but they definitely and necessarily exist.

In that case you should never look at the Pale Blue Dot image

You're looking for agoraphobic.

We're forever stuck inside a thin layer of the Earth surface. It makes me kind of claustrophobic.

Definitely not forever.

It's only my perceptions.

Yes, several hundreds of people had already been in space. Space travel could be the norm in the next few decades. Man could terraform Mars in the next millennium, or conquer the milky way galaxy five million years later.

However, I still feel like "we're stuck forever".

The sense of smallness of the self is probably what causes the claustrophobia. The last time I read of agoraphobia was in an Ian Fleming novel!

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