[dluan]

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.

[BLKNSLVR]

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]

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]

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]

Dived with them in the Red Sea. They can get pretty massive, and it can be slightly unsettling close up. They are odd creatures.

[chamomeal]

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

[khedoros1]

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.

[chamomeal]

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

[sph]

> 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.

[yuye]

>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.

[aplavin]

Looks interesting from the first glance! I should probably try that game – having both the artistic and realistic pictures in mind :)

[wffurr]

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.

[SapporoChris]

Easy cure, simply watch "The Black Hole",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.

[matheusmoreira]

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]

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]

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]

The event horizon might have a circumference as small as 12*Pi km but as I understand it, the radius is infinite. ;)

[LeoPanthera]

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.

[MaxikCZ]

Yes, altho "very long time" doesnt do it justice - while your light would be fading and redshifting, mathematically you could detect photons comming off you the whole remaining age of the universe.

[matheusmoreira]

That's... That's even more terrifying.

[hnlmorg]

It really doesn’t take much to bend light.

Supernova and asteroids were always scarier to me because they’re potentially planet-ending scenarios. Whereas a black hole is benign as long as you don’t move into its orbit at too acute an angle.

[GavinMcG]

> 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.

[cwnyth]

Helio- is actually "sun", not "hole", and it's Greek, not Latin, but I 100% agree with you: it's pointless technical vocabulary that only serves to obfuscate. I think in this particular case, it's just some internet neologism (which is a good word, since coinage can mean a couple different things), made based on analogies with older phobias. For those of us who know Latin and Greek, though, all we can really do is shrug at the eagerness to make the clumsiest words possible.

[ButlerianJihad]

My headcanon is that the neologism was coined by Vicky Karayiannis, widow of Chris Cornell.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Cornell#Personal_life

The modern Greek terms for "black hole" are:

μαύρη τρύπα or μελανή οπή

https://el.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%9C%CE%B1%CF%8D%CF%81%CE%B7...

helio- cannot mean "star" in a generic way but invariably refers to our own Sun. If referring to some other star, then we use aster-.

[antonvs]

The translation of the name appears to be intended as “black star fear”.

[TeMPOraL]

With the "black star" being the name for "black hole" back when they were purely theoretical idea.

[brador]

What would be the correct latin/greek word for it?

[stavros]

Melanotrypophobia, although the Greek term is "mayri trypa", literally "black hole".

[brador]

Any relation to the words melancholy?

[stavros]

Yes, as the sibling said, melancholy means "black bile".

[ButlerianJihad]

Yes, that is cognate with ancient Greek μελαγχολία, and with the same root: μέλας

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/melancholy

[kortilla]

Hypochondriac

[somenameforme]

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.

[taneq]

I’ve long considered medical jargon to be Latin Buffyspeak[1] because it’s usually just describing the body part, often simplistically, but in Latin so it sounds fancy.

[1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BuffySpeak

[antonvs]

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]

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.

[antonvs]

> I expect that people would have likely been less casual with their usage of such terms when they also had specific technical meanings.

Why would you expect that? It seems the opposite of what we see in practice. Colloquial language typically makes no concessions to technical usage.

Your example works against your own position. “Spaghetti” is an Italian word, much like the Greek portmanteau that started this discussion. The idea that it implies a particular sauce is purely regional, as you noted by saying “In the US”. (I had to ask an LLM what you might mean - apparently you would expect tomato sauce.) Ironically, that would not be expected in Italy.

So here we have a word taken from another language, which has a local connotation which depends on a shared context. As with all language, one has to learn that context. It doesn’t matter that much what the words are. If the word had been “thinnoodle” instead, that’s what you would have learned and been familiar with. (“Noodle” comes from German and entered English about 65 years before spaghetti, apparently.)

[somenameforme]

I suppose the difference I see, and the motivation for change, is an issue of familiarity. Everybody knows what spaghetti is and so calling it thin noodle doesn't add much clarity for most people. By contrast many, probably the overwhelming majority, of terms that are in Latin are unfamiliar. And continuing to pile on in that domain just adds to the things people will generally be unfamiliar with.

And these are in domains that people will certainly come into contact with in their life, like healthcare, so it's not like just nitpicking over e.g. pure math's preference for having people's names attached to various mathematical constructs as opposed to something even vaguely descriptive. Very few people will ever interact with pure math in 'normal' life, so it's largely inconsequential.

I mean just imagine we were going to do things over, and in starting to name medical conditions somebody said, 'Hey I have an idea - instead of naming everything in an obvious way let's name everything using some obscure language almost nobody understands.' Nobody would really be on board with that, but we ultimately ended up in that exact scenario.

[TeMPOraL]

"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.

[efilife]

It's useful to search for the same thing and get results in different languages

[ButlerianJihad]

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]

> 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.

[aplavin]

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]

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...

[efilife]

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

[dluan]

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.

[pea]

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

[robertlucas]

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

[efilife]

For anyone that experiences the same, how do you feel about this picture? 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

[qwertywert_]

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]

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.

[dluan]

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]

> 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.

[taneq]

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. ;)