Astrophysicist Michelle Thaller: On balancing nihilism and inspiration

[Magical Realist]

https://www.google.com/search?q=Michelle...vWjKk,st:0

"Michelle Thaller is an American astronomer, research scientist, and science communicator. Thaller is formerly the Assistant Director for Science Communication at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. She retired in 2024 after 27 years at NASA.

From 1998 to 2009 she was a staff scientist at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center, and later Manager of the Education and Public Outreach program for the Spitzer Space Telescope, at the California Institute of Technology. She is a frequent on-camera contributor to programming on The History Channel and Science Channel.

[C C]

https://bigthink.com/hard-science/meditation/

Scotty Hendricks: . . . Besides Thaller, plenty of other thinkers have looked up at the heavens, considered how small we are compared to it, and written about the anxiety it can produce.

The French-Algerian philosopher Albert Camus understood that the heavens could be the cause of a person suddenly feeling small and meaningless. [...] Camus suggests that we embrace this conflict between our desire for meaning and the indifference of the heavens. How to go about doing that is another problem.

Not everyone has seen this vastness as a good or even neutral thing though. H.P. Lovecraft used the vast, uncaring cosmos as a source of horror and madness in his stories. His characters often find themselves face to face with the cosmic insignificance of humanity and rarely come out of it whole.

Contrast his quote with Thaller’s:

“Now, all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large. To me, there is nothing but puerility in a tale in which the human form—and the local human passions and conditions and standards—are depicted as native to other worlds or other universes.” [see cosmicism]

Not quite as optimistic, is he?

The universe is unfathomably vast, filled with ageless stars that will live for uncompromisable eons and then die in cataclysmic explosions. We are small creatures that will live for the cosmic blink of an eye, and yet we are connected to the universe that at once thinks nothing of us and comprises us.

If these thoughts don’t help ease the anxiety of being so small compared to everything else, I don’t know what does.