In Space You're Likely To Crap Yourself

October 31, 2026

I received an article from Scientific American on Friday afternoon that I found most interesting. Scientific American has been around for a very long time and is the go to source for things scientific with authority. Anyway I follow SciAm with some frequency and have for quite some time. A noted astronomer, one Phil Plait, has authored up an article about the scary things in space. First off, there are more things in space to be afraid of than aliens that are hell bent on enslaving the population of Planet Earth. Or simply reducing Planet Earth to cosmic schmutz. Or some fantasy disaster created in the mind of a Ray Bradbury type. Plait writes about what is real and that makes all the difference in the world. Or close enough for the screeds I tend to pound out on the old keyboard. There are giants of a solar kind in our universe that are immensely giant on a scale that regular Joes will have trouble comprehending. These giants are called Wolf-Rayet stars and their size is cosmically gigantic. The luminosity of these massive giants is on a scale of magnitude multiple millions of times the brightness of our own sun. Ray Bans will not help you should one of the Wolf-Rayet stars happen by. Then we've got magnetars which are a subclass species of neutron stars. Magnetars are more powerful than a "normal" neutron star and the magnetar has magnetic fields that can be more than a quadrillion times stronger than that of our own little speck of a planet. Now I'm not much of a mathematician but anything that is quadrillion times more or less is way outside my pay grade of understanding. A magnetar would scrunch you flatter than subatomic grease. Magnetars do exist and we have astronomers and astrophysicists to thank for providing the intel on gravity on an unimaginable scale. Then we've got gamma ray bursts and super massive black holes merging and the accompanying gravitational waves that would send Planet Earth careening into a cosmic side pocket somewhere lightyears away from where we spin in orbit at present. So perhaps you've been worried about Epstein Files or the Ukraine/Russia dustup or the Israeli genocide/holocaust on Palestinians or how the fuck did these United States of America elect a slime ball such as trumpf. Well trust me kids, that shit is the very least of things we humans might want to fret about. In space, you're likely to shit your spacesuit so fast that there will be no need for any clean up on aisle 5. Now for Saturday machine art and happy Halloween everybody and watch out for those gravity waves.

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