It's almost an existential horror. At the same time, I wonder if the same applies when you try the same thing at a much lower order of magnitude.
From the perspective of light, eight minutes from the sun to Earth is a trip to the local shop. 7-ish hours to Pluto is a flight across the Atlantic or a rush-hour drive from Manchester to London. By that logic, the distances are only impossible because we don't live long enough to know what it's like.
What if you go smaller? What is the space between one land an another for a bird migrating south for the winter, looking down at nothing but blue and up but nothing but a different blue? What about the space between one bacterium and the next? Or the distance between an atom and its orbiting electron from the perspective of the atom?
What if you take it further and look at your connection to other people as your own gravitational pull? You might have gone through a fair bit of nothingness before you found them.
Being small doesn’t necessarily make you insignificant. Maybe you are, maybe you aren’t, but a vast quantity of completely empty space shouldn’t make you feel that way. It’s empty! Some big rocks? Chunks of ice? Clouds of gas? Who cares?
More terrifying, if you ask me, is the possibility that out of all this stuff we might very well be the only significant thing in all of it.
Anyone who is involved in a serious pursuit of science - especially cosmologists, astronomers, and physicists - has this same feeling of the inescapable insignificance. I'm not saying as a matter of reality that we are insignificant, but to feel that we might be the only significant thing in all of it strikes me as strange. To me, the normal reaction to discovering that the geocentric model is false and that we are part of a huge galaxy which is itself part of an infinite number of galaxies, etc etc should fill a person with a healthy sense of "wow, look at the vastness of the universe and how small we are in all of it." You're right that small doesn't mean insignificant, but the feeling of relative insignificance still seems inescapable to me and being small in the scheme of things is something that hits the emotions in a powerful way. The vastness of the universe should instill some humility I think.
