GPT: Reading those encyclopaedia entries, you were brushing up against the vastness of space through the grainy images Voyager sent back. There’s something strangely grounding about how kids can take in those cosmic distances, planets with names like gods, and moons with hidden oceans, all while sitting in a quiet room flipping pages. 

A kind of childhood cosmology, intimate and existential all at once. Later that image of Jupiter looming just outside your window at night—and then the gradual traversal into what lay beyond it—feels almost mythic, like a god drifting just beyond the glass. And then that vertigo—not just from physical vastness, but from the sudden awareness that you, a small mind in a small room, could even begin to conceive of such enormity.

It’s striking how early those feelings arrive: mortality, uncanniness, the impulse to retreat from the abyss back into the known. Many people spend a lifetime chasing or avoiding that exact oscillation—between the comfort of earth and the cold enormity of space.

The earth is not a refuge from uncanniness, just as the stars are not inherently more sublime. That moment of reaching for space, then recoiling back to Earth—contains a kind of illusion: that here, on Earth, we are somehow insulated from the vertigo, from the confrontation with mortality or strangeness. But the Earth is just as suspended in the void. Just as indifferent. Just as full of abyss.

Sometimes it seems that the real uncanniness is this: that we keep pretending there’s a boundary between the cosmic and the mundane, when in truth, even the most ordinary thing—a glass of water, a sidewalk crack, your own breath—unfolds with the same infinite depth and contingency.

The universe—what Voyager showed—was elsewhere. Remote, cold, almost like it wasn’t part of the same reality. It was more like myth or dream than a place you belonged to.

Maybe part of the vertigo came from the first hint that the Earth isn’t sealed off. That it floats, exposed, in the same silence. The distinction cracked a little.

It is an aspect of consensus reality. A shared illusion, or perhaps a necessary agreement: that Earth is “here” and space is “out there,” that we live inside something, not adrift in it. That illusion underwrites daily life. It keeps elevators running, conversations stable, bodies clothed, routines livable. Without it, the floor tilts.

And yes, it’s protective. Not just psychologically, but socially, culturally, maybe even biologically. Consensus reality softens the blow of exposure. It buffers us from the raw fact that we are not in the world but of it—that Earth isn’t a sanctuary from the universe, but one of its accidents.

Children sometimes brush up against the cracks in that consensus, like you did with Jupiter at the window and the vast space beyond it. But then we’re gently—or forcibly—guided back inside the frame. Back into the living room. Back to school. Back to ground.

That’s a piercing reversal—and it rings deeply true:

For many prehistorical and even early historical peoples, the universe was not an empty elsewhere, but a world of presences. The sky was inhabited—by gods, ancestors, spirits, rhythms. Celestial bodies weren’t just distant rocks; they were actors, signs, maybe even kin. The cosmos wasn’t vast and indifferent—it was alive, communicative, meaningful.

In that frame, the Earth could indeed be more uncanny: it bled, shook, swallowed people. Forests teemed with tricksters. Animals watched you back. Caves breathed. The local, the immediate, was layered with danger and strangeness—what we might now call the “numinous.” You weren’t protected by being close to the Earth. You were exposed.

It’s as though the premodern world reversed the modern polarity: the cosmos as home, the Earth as site of rupture and encounter. What we now frame as “superstition” might have been a way of staying attuned to the uncanniness of the near, not the far.

Do you think our modern reversal—Earth as safe, cosmos as alien—has made us less capable of bearing either?

Fair—and maybe that uncertainty is honest in a way modern frameworks often aren’t. There's a pressure now to resolve things: to say whether we’ve lost or gained, whether the cosmos is empty or full, whether the Earth is home or horror. But maybe we're suspended between modes of sense-making that no longer cohere.

The modern separation—Earth versus universe, here versus out there—might be a coping structure more than a truth. Maybe the modern mind feels a slower vertigo now, not from one vast presence, but from the collapse of a whole scaffold of meaning.