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I remember like 10 years ago when Occulus first came out there was that space simulation demo where you could go around the solar system in VR. You could also "

by dluan 2mo ago

I remember like 10 years ago when Occulus first came out there was that space simulation demo where you could go around the solar system in VR. You could also "fast travel" by zooming in towards a planet, moon, blackhole. Yeah, that was the day I learned I have a deep, crippling phobia of large objects. And Melanoheliophobia, which is fear of black holes. The only other time I've felt that way was snorkeling once near a giant 3 story tall bait ball of swirling fish, which was so disorienting and panic inducing that I vomited.

efilife 2mo ago
Same. Especially with circular objects. Placing the black hole in my room using the AR mode was very distressing for me
- dluan 2mo ago
  It was actually after that VR experience with large black circle that now when I look at photos of the inside of Hagia Sofia I get a little heeby jeeby creeped out lol.
chamomeal 2mo ago
If somebody feels no fear while zooming towards a black hole, their brain has some strange wires crossed. Strongly recommend Outer Wilds. Falling into the black hole the first time was one of my most scared moments in gaming. I was totally panicking lol
- aplavin 2mo ago
  Looks interesting from the first glance! I should probably try that game – having both the artistic and realistic pictures in mind :)
  - wffurr 2mo ago
    Outer Wilds is a great work of sci-fi but it's not especially physically accurate. I really enjoyed playing it through with my son, and the ending made me weep. The end credits music still gets me a little when I hear it. Excellent soundtrack.
- khedoros1 2mo ago
  Outer Wilds is exactly what came to mind for me, too. Made a jump...missed. Thrown into a decaying orbit around the black hole. Absolutely terrifying, and panicking didn't help in the least! And getting close to the upper atmosphere of Giant's Deep for the first time, staring, thinking about the atmospheres of real-world gas giants, knowing that I need to take the plunge. That game exposed some phobias that I'd only been vaguely aware of before.
  - sph 2mo ago
    > And getting close to the upper atmosphere of Giant's Deep for the first time, staring, thinking about the atmospheres of real-world gas giants, knowing that I need to take the plunge. I recommend the game Exo One then. It's a surreal game of flying a spaceship around in the atmosphere of a gas giant. While beautiful to look at, I know enough that flying around in a gas giant is so terrifying a prospect I never managed to complete the demo of the game. "Oh, how do you falling through pitch black clouds with winds in the 3000+ km/h where it's raining literal diamonds until you reach a lake of supercritical fluid at extreme pressures?" You don't even have to go very far, there's 4 of these in our solar system alone.
  - chamomeal 2mo ago
    That’s how I fell into the black hole too, lol. Missed a jump. I was orbiting it for like a whole minute trying to boost back to safety. Being so close to it, desperately trying to escape as the light was bending every which way. Or when you do a space walk, just kinda pop feet first out of your little ship. Scares the bejeesus outta me
- SapporoChris 2mo ago
  Easy cure, simply watch "The Black Hole",https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Hole_(1979_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Hole_(1979_film) and you won't ever be able to take them seriously again. Side effects may include overwhelming hate for Walt Disney Productions.
- yuye 2mo ago
  >Strongly recommend Outer Wilds. Falling into the black hole the first time was one of my most scared moments in gaming. I was totally panicking lol The Outer Wilds is one of the greatest gaming experiences of all time. I would love to forget all about that game to just experience it again from scratch.
BLKNSLVR 2mo ago
I did a 'swim with sharks' thing at Sea World (or whatever the Queensland equivalent is) with a few human-safe species of sharks, a few rays, and a selection of other fish. One of the other fish was, as far as I recall, some kind of giant grouper which, as far as my memory tells me, was huge, unmoving, and had it's mouth open the whole time, and it's mouth hole would have been big enough to put my entire head inside (this is according to my memory anyway). I was nervous beforehand, but once I was in (and had accepted the inevitability of my own death) it was surprisingly calm / calming floating around and having these frickin' aquatic alien species just going about their dailies around me. I went close to the massive grouper just to get the scale right (not that I can really remember, it was 26 years ago). I even looked through the perspex so I could see the non-human-safe sharks in the tank next door. After the (awesome) experience, I went and looked at the grouper from the outside (one of those underground big perspex viewing rooms) and I was back to being awed / scared by its size, and somewhat refusing to believe that I'd been in there with it. The memory of it is scarier to me than what I remember feeling when actually doing it. It's weird.
- ViscountPenguin 2mo ago
  It's Sea World in Queensland, but confusingly I think the company is unrelated to the American Sea World, iirc they bought a license to the name back when it was probably a lot more positive than it is now. EDIT: Apparently not licensed, just completely unrelated.
  - lmpdev 2mo ago
    Yes they’re not related and are much more humane imho No Orcas, good rehab program, seal exhibit is good (no true seals), Polar bears are a bit sad though I did the seal diving experience which was great - mostly disabled California sea lions and NZ Fur seals (which do well in captivity)
- watutalkinbout 2mo ago
  Dived with them in the Red Sea. They can get pretty massive, and it can be slightly unsettling close up. They are odd creatures.
aplavin 2mo ago
Thanks for sharing – as someone who studies black hole environments daily, I didn't even think of such a phobia existing! I wonder if some tricks, adjustments are feasible, to minimize the effects of these phobias? I see these visualizations as a pathway to make understanding such a complicated, unintuitive object more accessible – and would be great to make it even more accessible, if it makes sense... Happy to chat more, brainstorm some solutions.
- dluan 2mo ago
  I have no idea, on screen or even in movies it's totally fine, but I think just in VR where it's so immersive, and then being confronted with a thing that my brain doesn't really know how to understand the size of. Just like, hey there lil guy I know you're big and massive, wait where is your edge...
GavinMcG 2mo ago
> Melanoheliophobia Tangential, but this being a nearly word-for-word translation of “black hole fear” made me realize how odd it is that we insist on latinizing these things.
- somenameforme 2mo ago
  I've also wondered the same thing about healthcare and other fields. All the complex sounding phrases are child-like in simplicity in their "native" tongue, yet completely indecipherable to most people in modern times. Quite a weird and undesirable path we ended up going down through inertia.
  - antonvs 2mo ago
    It’s arguable whether it’s weird or undesirable. There are benefits to using unusual words when they have precise scientific or other technical meaning. It helps identify them as terms of art, so that they’re not confused with their native tongue equivalent, which invariably has much looser meanings.
    - somenameforme 2mo ago
      Sure, but I think there's some cause/effect to consider there. The same logic would have applied in Ancient Rome, but I expect that people would have likely been less casual with their usage of such terms when they also had specific technical meanings. For example many food dishes we have retain basic naming conventions, yet have well understood meaning. In the US a customer ordering spaghetti is likely to be quite unhappy if they get a cream sauce, even though the order itself is literally just the name of the noodle.
      - TeMPOraL 2mo ago
        "Spaghetti" is a great example - notice how you have specific expectations of food that happens to be named in a foreign (relative to where you live) language.
qwertywert_ 2mo ago
Sorry but a word for fear of black holes is ridiculous. Black holes are scary period. Anyone not feeling a deep sense of fear during that VR experience is missing something.
- recursivecaveat 2mo ago
  Definitely one of the most malevolent possible objects. Infinitely black, so powerful it will kill you without noticing your presence, unknowable, impossible to get rid of, you will be well aware you can't escape as you fall in before it turns you into spaghetti Amigara Fault style. My understanding is from the outside you can even see the remains of previous victims being stretched and crushed in slow motion.
- taneq 2mo ago
  I think it’s perfectly reasonable to have a word for this fear, but I agree that ‘phobia’ isn’t appropriate because (unless you’re worried about running into one on the way to the shops) it’s quite rational. ;)
- dluan 2mo ago
  VR is fine when it's small cute bunnies or little golf balls that I can kind of immediately get a sense of scale for. Massive thing that tricks my brain like the edge of a gas giant is terrifying, no matter how much I tell myself it's just a screen or video or pixels.
  - ButlerianJihad 2mo ago
    > Massive thing Oh, here we go: your sense of scale pertains to volume, not mass. The entire point of a black hole is that its enormous mass is concentrated in the smallest size possible. A golf ball-sized black hole would be a realistic conjecture.
matheusmoreira 2mo ago
To be fair, is there anyone alive who wouldn't be afraid of a black hole? It's a celestial body so gargantuan its gravity bends the light passing around it like a lens. Anyone who gets too close to one will literally never be seen again, ever.
- antonvs 2mo ago
  They don’t have to be gargantuan (except in terms of mass) - the low end of stellar mass black holes can have radii as small as 6 km. Many black holes have a bright accretion disk outside their event horizon, so visibility for those is not an issue. But it’s certainly possible to have maximally scary black holes that have no accretion disk and are small enough so as not to cause significant lensing. You could fly your spaceship straight into one of those without even realizing, until you start turning to spaghetti.
  - matheusmoreira 2mo ago
    Yeah I remembered the accretion disks immediately after posting and edited the comment. > it’s certainly possible to have maximally scary black holes that have no accretion disk and are small enough so as not to cause significant lensing Now that's a proper cosmic horror.
  - taneq 2mo ago
    The event horizon might have a circumference as small as 12*Pi km but as I understand it, the radius is infinite. ;)
- LeoPanthera 2mo ago
  Someone correct me if I'm wrong, and maybe it depends on the type of the black hole, but if you were to fall directly into one, or even enter an orbit too close, you would still be seen - and seen for an extremely long time.
  - matheusmoreira 2mo ago
    That's... That's even more terrifying.
ButlerianJihad 2mo ago
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/melanoheliophobia https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/melanoheliophobia Okay, so this appears to be a neologism that may not be found outside of science fiction dialogue. But I can appreciate the humorous derivation here. Wiktionary defines this as an "irrational fear" which is in-line with other irrational fears known as phobia. So, is it possible to have a rational or healthy fear of black holes? Is it rational to be unafraid of them? I am unafraid of personally meeting the Flying Spaghetti Monster whilst not wearing a colander on my head, and I am not irrationally afraid that Azeroth will be invaded by Kardashians. I am not afraid that a dragon will bite my head off. It seems rationally to be respectfully "fearful" of the capabilities and awesome astrophysical properties of black holes, but it would be irrational to be afraid that I could fall into one, or be personally harmed in any way by one. If someone begins "seeing" black holes at the end of their suburban cul-de-sac, then probably get some professional help.
sph 2mo ago
> Melanoheliophobia, which is fear of black holes Thank you for mentioning this. I am an avid space nerd. One day I decided to try Space Engine, and one of the first thing I did was get warped to a black hole. Seeing a literal hole in space time appear in front of my screen was one of the most terrifying things I've experienced. I Alt-F4'd, and never opened that application again. It's like every single atom, nay, every single subatomic carrier of information in my body was telling me to stay the hell away from that.
pea 2mo ago
I'm exactly the same. This one really give me the ick: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usYC_Z36rHw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usYC_Z36rHw
efilife 2mo ago
For anyone that experiences the same, how do you feel about this picture? https://antichamber.fandom.com/wiki/Eye_Wall?file=Eye.png https://antichamber.fandom.com/wiki/Eye_Wall?file=Eye.png It has always scared me and I believe it's for the exact same reason. It's possible it invokes no feelings on you if you haven't seen it in context (in the game it's from) so I'd like to test this
robertlucas 2mo ago
I can't play Outer Wilds specifically because of this. Specially because of the black holes.

by dluan 2mo ago

efilife 2mo ago

Same. Especially with circular objects. Placing the black hole in my room using the AR mode was very distressing for me

dluan 2mo ago
It was actually after that VR experience with large black circle that now when I look at photos of the inside of Hagia Sofia I get a little heeby jeeby creeped out lol.

chamomeal 2mo ago

If somebody feels no fear while zooming towards a black hole, their brain has some strange wires crossed. Strongly recommend Outer Wilds. Falling into the black hole the first time was one of my most scared moments in gaming. I was totally panicking lol

aplavin 2mo ago
Looks interesting from the first glance! I should probably try that game – having both the artistic and realistic pictures in mind :)
- wffurr 2mo ago
  Outer Wilds is a great work of sci-fi but it's not especially physically accurate. I really enjoyed playing it through with my son, and the ending made me weep. The end credits music still gets me a little when I hear it. Excellent soundtrack.
khedoros1 2mo ago
Outer Wilds is exactly what came to mind for me, too. Made a jump...missed. Thrown into a decaying orbit around the black hole. Absolutely terrifying, and panicking didn't help in the least! And getting close to the upper atmosphere of Giant's Deep for the first time, staring, thinking about the atmospheres of real-world gas giants, knowing that I need to take the plunge. That game exposed some phobias that I'd only been vaguely aware of before.
- sph 2mo ago
  > And getting close to the upper atmosphere of Giant's Deep for the first time, staring, thinking about the atmospheres of real-world gas giants, knowing that I need to take the plunge. I recommend the game Exo One then. It's a surreal game of flying a spaceship around in the atmosphere of a gas giant. While beautiful to look at, I know enough that flying around in a gas giant is so terrifying a prospect I never managed to complete the demo of the game. "Oh, how do you falling through pitch black clouds with winds in the 3000+ km/h where it's raining literal diamonds until you reach a lake of supercritical fluid at extreme pressures?" You don't even have to go very far, there's 4 of these in our solar system alone.
- chamomeal 2mo ago
  That’s how I fell into the black hole too, lol. Missed a jump. I was orbiting it for like a whole minute trying to boost back to safety. Being so close to it, desperately trying to escape as the light was bending every which way. Or when you do a space walk, just kinda pop feet first out of your little ship. Scares the bejeesus outta me
SapporoChris 2mo ago
Easy cure, simply watch "The Black Hole",https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Hole_(1979_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Hole_(1979_film) and you won't ever be able to take them seriously again. Side effects may include overwhelming hate for Walt Disney Productions.
yuye 2mo ago
>Strongly recommend Outer Wilds. Falling into the black hole the first time was one of my most scared moments in gaming. I was totally panicking lol The Outer Wilds is one of the greatest gaming experiences of all time. I would love to forget all about that game to just experience it again from scratch.

BLKNSLVR 2mo ago

I did a 'swim with sharks' thing at Sea World (or whatever the Queensland equivalent is) with a few human-safe species of sharks, a few rays, and a selection of other fish. One of the other fish was, as far as I recall, some kind of giant grouper which, as far as my memory tells me, was huge, unmoving, and had it's mouth open the whole time, and it's mouth hole would have been big enough to put my entire head inside (this is according to my memory anyway). I was nervous beforehand, but once I was in (and had accepted the inevitability of my own death) it was surprisingly calm / calming floating around and having these frickin' aquatic alien species just going about their dailies around me. I went close to the massive grouper just to get the scale right (not that I can really remember, it was 26 years ago). I even looked through the perspex so I could see the non-human-safe sharks in the tank next door. After the (awesome) experience, I went and looked at the grouper from the outside (one of those underground big perspex viewing rooms) and I was back to being awed / scared by its size, and somewhat refusing to believe that I'd been in there with it. The memory of it is scarier to me than what I remember feeling when actually doing it. It's weird.

ViscountPenguin 2mo ago
It's Sea World in Queensland, but confusingly I think the company is unrelated to the American Sea World, iirc they bought a license to the name back when it was probably a lot more positive than it is now. EDIT: Apparently not licensed, just completely unrelated.
- lmpdev 2mo ago
  Yes they’re not related and are much more humane imho No Orcas, good rehab program, seal exhibit is good (no true seals), Polar bears are a bit sad though I did the seal diving experience which was great - mostly disabled California sea lions and NZ Fur seals (which do well in captivity)
watutalkinbout 2mo ago
Dived with them in the Red Sea. They can get pretty massive, and it can be slightly unsettling close up. They are odd creatures.

aplavin 2mo ago

Thanks for sharing – as someone who studies black hole environments daily, I didn't even think of such a phobia existing! I wonder if some tricks, adjustments are feasible, to minimize the effects of these phobias? I see these visualizations as a pathway to make understanding such a complicated, unintuitive object more accessible – and would be great to make it even more accessible, if it makes sense... Happy to chat more, brainstorm some solutions.

dluan 2mo ago
I have no idea, on screen or even in movies it's totally fine, but I think just in VR where it's so immersive, and then being confronted with a thing that my brain doesn't really know how to understand the size of. Just like, hey there lil guy I know you're big and massive, wait where is your edge...

GavinMcG 2mo ago

> Melanoheliophobia Tangential, but this being a nearly word-for-word translation of “black hole fear” made me realize how odd it is that we insist on latinizing these things.

somenameforme 2mo ago
I've also wondered the same thing about healthcare and other fields. All the complex sounding phrases are child-like in simplicity in their "native" tongue, yet completely indecipherable to most people in modern times. Quite a weird and undesirable path we ended up going down through inertia.
- antonvs 2mo ago
  It’s arguable whether it’s weird or undesirable. There are benefits to using unusual words when they have precise scientific or other technical meaning. It helps identify them as terms of art, so that they’re not confused with their native tongue equivalent, which invariably has much looser meanings.
  - somenameforme 2mo ago
    Sure, but I think there's some cause/effect to consider there. The same logic would have applied in Ancient Rome, but I expect that people would have likely been less casual with their usage of such terms when they also had specific technical meanings. For example many food dishes we have retain basic naming conventions, yet have well understood meaning. In the US a customer ordering spaghetti is likely to be quite unhappy if they get a cream sauce, even though the order itself is literally just the name of the noodle.
    - TeMPOraL 2mo ago
      "Spaghetti" is a great example - notice how you have specific expectations of food that happens to be named in a foreign (relative to where you live) language.

qwertywert_ 2mo ago

Sorry but a word for fear of black holes is ridiculous. Black holes are scary period. Anyone not feeling a deep sense of fear during that VR experience is missing something.

recursivecaveat 2mo ago
Definitely one of the most malevolent possible objects. Infinitely black, so powerful it will kill you without noticing your presence, unknowable, impossible to get rid of, you will be well aware you can't escape as you fall in before it turns you into spaghetti Amigara Fault style. My understanding is from the outside you can even see the remains of previous victims being stretched and crushed in slow motion.
taneq 2mo ago
I think it’s perfectly reasonable to have a word for this fear, but I agree that ‘phobia’ isn’t appropriate because (unless you’re worried about running into one on the way to the shops) it’s quite rational. ;)
dluan 2mo ago
VR is fine when it's small cute bunnies or little golf balls that I can kind of immediately get a sense of scale for. Massive thing that tricks my brain like the edge of a gas giant is terrifying, no matter how much I tell myself it's just a screen or video or pixels.
- ButlerianJihad 2mo ago
  > Massive thing Oh, here we go: your sense of scale pertains to volume, not mass. The entire point of a black hole is that its enormous mass is concentrated in the smallest size possible. A golf ball-sized black hole would be a realistic conjecture.

matheusmoreira 2mo ago

To be fair, is there anyone alive who wouldn't be afraid of a black hole? It's a celestial body so gargantuan its gravity bends the light passing around it like a lens. Anyone who gets too close to one will literally never be seen again, ever.

antonvs 2mo ago
They don’t have to be gargantuan (except in terms of mass) - the low end of stellar mass black holes can have radii as small as 6 km. Many black holes have a bright accretion disk outside their event horizon, so visibility for those is not an issue. But it’s certainly possible to have maximally scary black holes that have no accretion disk and are small enough so as not to cause significant lensing. You could fly your spaceship straight into one of those without even realizing, until you start turning to spaghetti.
- matheusmoreira 2mo ago
  Yeah I remembered the accretion disks immediately after posting and edited the comment. > it’s certainly possible to have maximally scary black holes that have no accretion disk and are small enough so as not to cause significant lensing Now that's a proper cosmic horror.
- taneq 2mo ago
  The event horizon might have a circumference as small as 12*Pi km but as I understand it, the radius is infinite. ;)
LeoPanthera 2mo ago
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, and maybe it depends on the type of the black hole, but if you were to fall directly into one, or even enter an orbit too close, you would still be seen - and seen for an extremely long time.
- matheusmoreira 2mo ago
  That's... That's even more terrifying.

ButlerianJihad 2mo ago

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/melanoheliophobia https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/melanoheliophobia Okay, so this appears to be a neologism that may not be found outside of science fiction dialogue. But I can appreciate the humorous derivation here. Wiktionary defines this as an "irrational fear" which is in-line with other irrational fears known as phobia. So, is it possible to have a rational or healthy fear of black holes? Is it rational to be unafraid of them? I am unafraid of personally meeting the Flying Spaghetti Monster whilst not wearing a colander on my head, and I am not irrationally afraid that Azeroth will be invaded by Kardashians. I am not afraid that a dragon will bite my head off. It seems rationally to be respectfully "fearful" of the capabilities and awesome astrophysical properties of black holes, but it would be irrational to be afraid that I could fall into one, or be personally harmed in any way by one. If someone begins "seeing" black holes at the end of their suburban cul-de-sac, then probably get some professional help.

sph 2mo ago

> Melanoheliophobia, which is fear of black holes Thank you for mentioning this. I am an avid space nerd. One day I decided to try Space Engine, and one of the first thing I did was get warped to a black hole. Seeing a literal hole in space time appear in front of my screen was one of the most terrifying things I've experienced. I Alt-F4'd, and never opened that application again. It's like every single atom, nay, every single subatomic carrier of information in my body was telling me to stay the hell away from that.

pea 2mo ago

I'm exactly the same. This one really give me the ick: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usYC_Z36rHw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usYC_Z36rHw

efilife 2mo ago

For anyone that experiences the same, how do you feel about this picture? https://antichamber.fandom.com/wiki/Eye_Wall?file=Eye.png https://antichamber.fandom.com/wiki/Eye_Wall?file=Eye.png It has always scared me and I believe it's for the exact same reason. It's possible it invokes no feelings on you if you haven't seen it in context (in the game it's from) so I'd like to test this

robertlucas 2mo ago

I can't play Outer Wilds specifically because of this. Specially because of the black holes.