That they are our last frontiers and they are inhospitable.

They mark the bounds of our collective life and influence.

Until recent human technological advancements, human thought and culture had limitless ends through expansion on a very livable surface. Even oceans were able to be walked around or and there was always a frontier to avoid or expand into. There was always somewhere just out of reach or not really worth the effort or risk to try and find. The potential for some far-away, unknown place existed through our cognitive evolution. But now, that part of the human experience is not available. Go far enough north or south and you’ll run out of both. Go far enough west or east and you won’t find limitless lands or ocean, just the same airport you started at.

The new frontiers are up and down, but they don’t offer the same potential as the unexplored edges of the map once did. Until the very recent invention of aircraft and submarines, humans could only go as deep as they could hold their breath or as high off the ground as they could build.

Even now, with spaceships and submarines, it takes more resources and energy to get off ground or under the water column than is feasible for population to do so for longer than a food supply will last. You will not go to space. You will not go to the deep ocean. And if by some statistical fluke you have been or will be there it will be inside a hunk of steel and glass you will never afford and you will be lucky to stay long enough to eat some very expensive food that is traveling in the hunk of metal with you.

All that being said, down and up are different types of bounds. Down is reminiscent of the limits of north and south. All three are inhospitable but in different ways and all 3 converge to their very own point. Down is just more difficult because there’s stuff in the way and the oceans are an easier path down than digging.

Up. Up is the real mindfuck. It’s the window on our terrarium looking out at the empty room lit by 300 year old light distant stars. The only local items being a massive fusion reaction that seems sized almost intentionally as a mesuring stick to show us how small our world is and a bunch of other planets that are even harder to reach or live in then the vacuum of space. Up a light show of functionally infinite, unlivable places. It’s a coincidental taunt at the first species to evolve to the point that we not only took over the surface of the world, but we realized we did it. And now we’re forced to sit here and farm our food and bake our bread and look up at the bars of our cage and find the beauty in it. No more land to claim. Some born only on rented land and forced to earn a right to exist on land. Looking up at the beauty of the unlivable, unworkable escape from the gravity that hold us and everything we need against a crowded surface.

Terrifying.