Don't Panic, It’s Just the Cosmos: Calibrating Our Reality Settings in an Age of Clickbait

  by your dedicated rogue correspondent Sh0n Grub (reporting for the Oscillating Oculus)

Einstein Crater region near the Moon's northwestern limb 

Source: Sergey Kuznetsov / Getty Images

    By now we've all been sideswiped against the calcified inner walls of this cavernous metropolis of hollow hallways so many times, it's a wonder we're still conscious.   Well I'm here with our latest update on the state of our natural world and existence, brought to you with the same unflinching and deadpan seriousness and stunning degree of impartial fact-checking you've come to appreciate over the years here at DUMZINE.  

    You know you can count on me to bring you the facts and nothing but the facts, and not only that, to preserve them with their proper sense of context.  It's a big world we all dwell upon. So big, in fact, that the reality of it exceeds all of our expectations, and that's something you can come to count on.  Let me give you an example.  

   About twelve hours ago, at approximately  12:35 AM Mountain Time, a spent SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage brought an end to its 18-month orbital drift by striking the lunar surface near Einstein Crater at roughly 5,400 mph. Originally launched in January 2025 to boost two lunar landers into deep space, the four-ton, school-bus-sized piece of hardware exhausted its fuel and became an unguided satellite. Over the past year and a half, a complex push-and-pull of solar radiation pressure and gravitational perturbations slowly warped its orbit until its path finally intersected with the Moon, leaving behind a fresh, 15-meter crater, and adding one more tiny human mark to the quiet surface.

    Let's put this in perspective.  To put that spent booster into true physical context, consider the natural bombardments that have shaped the Moon for billions of years: while the Falcon 9 stage weighed roughly four metric tons and hit at a lethargic  5,400  mph, average space rocks strike the lunar crust at ten times that speed, with high-velocity comets reaching   speeds up to  160,000  mph! Even a modest iron meteoroid weighing a few dozen pounds delivers vastly more explosive kinetic energy than our four-ton piece of space junk.  At the absolute extreme end of cosmic violence sit titan-class impacts like the one that carved out the South Pole-Aitken Basin. Formed roughly four billion years ago by an asteroid estimated at over  100  kilometers  in diameter, that single collision excavated a colossal crater roughly  2,500  kilometers (1,550  miles) across and over 8 kilometers deep:  a scar wide enough to span half the continental United States. Next to all the multi-kilometer basins and millions of natural craters dotting the surface of our moon, a human booster carving out a temporary 15-meter pockmark doesn't even qualify as a drop in the ocean; it's a microscopic fraction of a droplet, not even worthy of measurement against the colossal and scarred satellite which we take for granted as the moon. 

   Look, I'm trying to tell y'all something, here.  Do you remember back in 2018, when that volcano went off in Hawaii?  Kīlauea erupted along the Lower East Rift Zone on Hawaii’s Big Island, sending relentless rivers of lava surging down into the Puna District near the coast. Between May and August, the flows swallowed entire neighborhoods—demolishing 716 homes, displacing thousands of people, and completely reshaping the shoreline as molten rock poured straight into Kapoho Bay. It served as a stark, violent reminder of what real geological muscle actually looks like when the Earth decides to reshape itself.  Except for one thing: despite the extent of the damage, and in no way, shape or form do I intend to diminish that, it must be understood in its proper context and scale.  Online articles almost always work as "power presentations," invariably showing a map of the Big Island, and a large "X" or "O" to mark the spot, a circle on the map designating where the volcano is located.  And always, these graphics drastically exaggerate the true proportions into something that gets translated in our heads into hundreds of thousands of times greater than it really is.  Because if we were to have taken the trouble to identify the square miles size of the area around the volcano itself, including the neighboring homes that were devastated, we would find it to be barely a pixel on the extreme edge of the map of the island.  

    Let's face it.  It's time for us reasoning and reasonable human beings subject to the whims of the internet to adjust our "reality knobs" to calibrate with the actual scale of places and events in our lives.  And the truth remains.  We not only dwell in cities that are bigger,  in counties that are much larger than we'd typically imagine; in states whose dimensions exceed our ordinary expectations, but comparatively speaking, to states such as Texas, and then Alaska which happens to be more than twice its size, we human beings dwell on a planet so much vaster and larger than we're ordinarily capable of appreciating, well it goes without saying that our moon itself is so much farther away and larger than we really know, and that's just the start of it.  

   The distances between our planet and Venus, Mercury, and the Sun; and the distance between us and Mars, and the asteroid belt, and Jupiter, not to mention the remaining three gas giants, all the way out to Neptune, just happens to be on a scale so much greater than we are normally wont to consider, that if we were to be exposed to the actual ratios and distances, it would more than stagger our minds, it would leave us stunned bordering on miscomprehension, and that's not even leaving our solar system yet.  

   My point remains sharp and focused, as lucid as a cricket hopping outside in your yard, as serrated as a blade of grass zoomed in upon in all its intricate and glorious organic machination.  We exist in a world whose intricacy and  size  so outstrips our everyday, normal default setting of perception that I want you all to consider what the ramifications of this may be.  It's simple, really.   Howard Phillips Lovecraft famously wrote, "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."  

   Well I have a somewhat extraordinary inverse view to that outlook.  For me, the fantastical and bordering on supernatural size and complexity of the cosmos begs a different reaction.  It becomes the ultimate source of reassurance.  Because we were all born into this life however many years of age we each happen to be.  For me, it's bordering on sixty years.  Yet here I still am, wondering at the vast complexity and miraculous nature of our existence.  You see, don't you, as I do, that the absurdly enormous distances between our planets and Sun and neighboring stars in our galaxy are all linked together by electromagnetic forces we simply have barely even the slightest clue about, don't you?  There's a certain amount of scientific faith one may become vested in, considering the totality of that scale. 

   And I'm here to tell you, breathe in . . .  breathe out . . . everything we read online  (and I do mean everything without exception) regarding world events and natural calamities gets amped up and blown out of proportion so radically off base from the true and actual context in reality that we are more often than not click-baited into feeling inordinately more anxiety and discomfort than might be allocated for us, when you stop and think about it for a few sobering moments.  This has been your daily announcement from DUMZINE to get us all to breathe a little easier and try not to succumb to the disproportional and sensationalist news bait articles vying for our attention.  Instead, sit back and relax and try to enjoy your time here, if even for an hour or two.  If we train our minds to stay on track with this reality, we might even enjoy a perpetual feeling of peacefulness and relaxation, knowing that the miracle of our existence remains something we'll never fully understand, so why not let it all go and enjoy the ride?