August 24th, Year XXXX

Space. The last frontier. The cosmos and the heavens. It's a topic that always fascinated me, and it's something of a hobby of mine. Whether it be stargazing and figuring out the constellations or researching different phenomena in the sky. But before I fell in love with it, I first feared it. I feared its infinite expanse, I feared how little I was and how little I knew. I feared what may lay in those specs in the night sky, or what lay in between the lights, that dark void of nothingness. When I was young and I thought about these concepts, about what infinity really was, it invoked a sense of panic, or confusion. So much so that it might make me go mad. And this concept, which I was not aware of at the time was called Cosmic Horror. An idea discovered, or at least brought into light by H.P. Lovecraft, a name that at least sounds familiar to quite a lot of people. Lovecraft was an author who wrote mostly short stories that explored the ideas of human being insignificant and nothing but a speck of dust in the grand scheme of the universe. He wrote about beings beyond human comprehension, who if even looked upon would make one go mad. One of these beings was named Cthulhu, another iconic name and symbol. A giant monster who sleeps beneath the sea with tentacles for a face. His stories would give rise to the Lovecraftian mythos and inspire a lot of works, but it also gave rise to the genre of cosmic horror. A type of horror that isn't gory or has any jump scares, and instead it's a fear that feeds on your capability to understand the world around you, but not to its fullest extent, you don't understand the secrets of the universe, and that scares you. There's a quote that encapsulates cosmic horror by Lovecraft himself, "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown." Along with some other great ones that I will hopefully explore as I research this topic. Some questions I might explore are; Why do these types of thoughts make people scared? Even with all of our technology and understanding of the universe, why are we still scared? Is ignorance a good thing, at least in this context? Is there something in our subconscious that protects us against these types of things? Why is this type of horror different, does it invoke a different type of fear than other horror?