the.com/space
the universe's brutal joke: mostly empty, mostly silent, mostly trying to kill you.
means the boundless three-dimensional expanse in which all objects exist and move, or specifically the vast vacuum beyond Earth's atmosphere.
from From Latin spatium, meaning 'room, extent, distance,' which traveled through Old French espace before arriving in English. For centuries it simply meant a gap or interval — the space between two things. The cosmic sense, the great black void with stars in it, is a relative newcomer that bloomed as astronomy did, turning a humble word for 'room' into a name for everything that isn't us.
- smell
- astronauts report it smells like seared steak and metal
- temperature
- it has none until something is there to feel it
- silence
- no air means screams travel exactly nowhere
- proximity
- it starts roughly 62 miles straight up
- emptiness
- a single atom per cubic centimeter, on average
apollo 11 — first manned moon landing, july 20 1969, neil armstrong
international space station — orbiting laboratory at 400km altitude, continuously inhabited since november 2000
james webb space telescope — infrared observatory launched december 2021, observes earliest galaxies
voyager 1 — spacecraft launched 1977, furthest human-made object from earth at 24 billion km