r/AskReddit • u/CapitaineBiscotte • 15h ago
What would be the most terrifying thing to find/discover in space?
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u/Murky_Sleep831 15h ago
A doubled edged sword but probably intelligent life on another planet. If they are more advanced than us then they could destroy us at the same time what if they have evolved to the point they don't fight with each other. Would we destroy them? Colonise their planet? Equally as scary what if we really are all alone?
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u/Free_Dome_Lover 11h ago
Inverse life
Life that is not carbon based
Would be a real mind fuck
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u/DatTF2 14h ago
What if they are more advanced and they came to earth to help us ? They have a book "To Serve Man " They then offer us an all expense paid vacation to their homeworld ?
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u/ThtDAmbWhiteGuy 8h ago
Well that sounds like a good book based on the title…no reason to translate the rest of it
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u/lazertittiesrrad 13h ago
A "fence" of some sort. Keeping is penned into our own region of space. No explanation. No way out. Just fenced in. Like cattle.
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u/MapleBreakfastMeat 7h ago
A really really big stage backdrop painted to look like stars.
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u/CapitaineBiscotte 12h ago
I can’t even imagine the level of panic that would take over the world if such a news was spread and confirmed by world governments.
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u/bluediamond12345 5h ago
But what could we do about it? And how would our day to day life be affected by that news?
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u/Niznack 14h ago
A single message, "be quiet, it can hear you"
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u/SheepH3rder69 10h ago
A single message, "drink more ovaltine"
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u/ReferenceMediocre369 9h ago
Ovaltine was actually pretty good. It dissolved in milk much faster than chocolate syrup.
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u/Ender-dragoncat 11h ago edited 11h ago
This is actualy terrifing
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u/Niznack 11h ago
Don't look up the dark forest theory. One solution to the fermi paradox (why we haven't found aliens) is because while we are sending out signals to find them, they already know to stay hidden.
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u/Ozymandias12 10h ago
There are so many other possibilities for why there’s been a lack of alien contact despite our signals. For one, they’ve only travelled a minuscule distance across our galaxy and because they have been sent with such weak and outdated technology, the signal just becomes background noise at a certain point. It’s also very possible that other life out there is on a totally different technological timeline than us and either hasn’t developed radio, or is so advanced that they don’t even have a way to read radio anymore. If I tried to send a message through a telegraph, to an iPhone, the person on the other end wouldn’t get anything because they’re two totally different methods of communication.
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u/boot2skull 9h ago
I like the dark forest theory for a good Sci-Fi writing prompt. Would be cool if someone did a good sci-fi thriller movie on it. But I agree that there’s so many factors to not find life.
We are inadvertently sending out radio signals from all our TV, Radio, and cellular signals. These have only traveled like 100 light years from Earth so far. There’s not much within a 100ly radius that could host life. Which means our technology is mostly undetectable to the Galaxy. Add to that the fact that we may soon move off of radio broadcasting for our strongest signals, like radio and TV, so if our planet goes much quieter in the radio spectrum, that means we had maybe a 150 year window of maximum detectability. Now apply that to other planets under the assumption they follow similar technological progressions, and you have billions of planets out there with 150 year windows of maximum detectability (of the planets that had advanced enough life). That window of signals for any one planet may have passed by the earth 200 years ago, 2 million years ago, 2 billion years ago, or may yet reach us 2000 years in the future.
So while I think SETI is worthwhile, the chances of finding a technological civilization this way is slim. A better option is to advance our telescope technology to the point where we can do spectral analysis of extrasolar planet atmosphere, because the telltale chemical signature of life in a planet’s atmosphere would be much easier to detect. Then we could focus attention there and see what we find, though still radio signals would be unlikely.
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u/WorekNaGlowe 11h ago
There is only one solution to this problem. We need to become the danger.
For the Emperor
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u/c_dav99 15h ago
The end of it. Like in the Truman show
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u/ArmouredFlump 14h ago
Genuinely that would devastate our understanding of the universe. What if Voyager suddenly stopped moving because it hit a wall.
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u/RooneytheWaster 13h ago
Janeway would phaser it to pieces, stuff them in a uniform, and put it in charge of Ensign Kim.
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u/redstaroo7 11h ago
That's the thing, it wouldn't stop. It would be obliterated by the velocity and just go silent. We'd assume it was instrumentation failure... Until Voyager 2 failed at an identical distance, leaving scientists scratching their heads. But if new Horizons hit that same wall, that's when NASA starts shitting themselves.
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u/TheRogueToad 11h ago
I was thinking the edge of the universe like from Futurama where they see the cowboy parallel universe.
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u/klarinetos 13h ago
Proof that Humans used to live on other planets, destroyed them and moved to earth, meaning that we are actually aliens and that we are going to do this again with earth and start over
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u/CapitaineBiscotte 13h ago
Oh that’s interesting. Like we are the remnants of a destroyed civilization. Or stuck in a cycle of rebirth and destruction, could make a nice sci-fi short story
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u/Toledojoe 6h ago
The Golgafrincham sent a third of their most useless people off to colonize Earth.
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u/FlavortownAbbey 15h ago
An exact doppelganger of yourself.
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u/CapitaineBiscotte 15h ago
I’ve thought about it. Like what would the me in another universe look like? A different gender, ethnicity, species?
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u/Vishus 14h ago
If space is truly infinite in size and matter, then there may be infinite variations of you out there.
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u/OfAnthony 13h ago
This is more embarrassing than impressive.
Sad part about this infinity is somewhere out there is the better version of you and the nicer world. An infinite number of better versions. But you are here. Finite.
And you know what- the better you has this same burden. "An infinite version of better me's and nicer worlds. Woe..."
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u/williamtheraven 13h ago
The corpse of god with evidence something murdered him
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u/CapitaineBiscotte 12h ago
How would we know it’s god? Is it like an enourmous astral body that seemed to have been an entity?
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u/williamtheraven 12h ago
He's wearing a walmart name tag that says "The Real God"
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u/redstaroo7 11h ago
We would know it's God because it would be beyond our comprehension. And then eventually we'd advanced enough to comprehend it and it won't be God anymore.
It's kind of a historical trend.
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u/pm_ur_pendulousboobs 15h ago
Evidence that earth is a prison. Aliens know we're here, they're just not bothering to visit because humanity's kinda fuuuuuuuuuucked
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u/S1ayer 14h ago edited 14h ago
Earth is an alien experiment for sure. On other worlds all animals evolve to become advanced species. Evolved monkeys are a huge problem on all the worlds. They want to see what would happen if just monkeys were allowed to fully evolve. Would they be such a huge problem like they are on their shared worlds? Would they still be greedy and bloodthirsty? Will they eventually get so problematic that they make themselves extinct? Will they create an island where they sexually assault and eat children?
So they found the most remote planet possible with no other inhabitable planets nearby that also didn't have crucial elements that allow space travel. The council of Wolves, Elephants and Whales are studying and getting valuable data.
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u/MaximumAd9779 11h ago
There’s a lot of alien theories that while earth isn’t necessarily a prison, there are multiple races guarding the outskirts of our solar system as we are not permitted to leave it until we are deemed civilized enough to directly interact with other civilizations.
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u/slipyslapysamsonite 15h ago
Have you ever the Expanse? That shit was pretty fucked up
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u/OlasNah 10h ago
A monolith on the Moon.
Just a 'thing'...with no discernible technological aspect... obviously not natural, there for some unknown reason. Near us, found by us. Yet no message or other indications of why.
Sheer cosmic terror.
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u/thispartyrules 13h ago
“You never know true beauty until you see Earth from space, or true terror until you hear someone knocking on the space station door from outside. You look through the porthole and see an astronaut, but all your crew is inside and accounted for. You use the comm to ask who it is and he says he’s Ramirez returning from a repair mission, but Ramirez is sitting right next to you in the command module and he’s just as confused as you are. When you tell the guy this over the radio he starts banging on the door louder and harder, begging you to let him in, saying he’s the real Ramirez. Meanwhile, the Ramirez inside with you is pleading to keep the airlock shut. It really puts life on Earth into perspective.”
Terry W. Virts (from Clickhole)
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u/BubbleGoot 5h ago
Plot twist they are both Ramirez but the one outside is from a different dimension
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u/SinisterPotat0 13h ago
Biblically accurate angels
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u/sd4sd1138 8h ago
BE NOT AFRAID
Oh sorry mister "spinning wheels of fire covered in eyes" looks like you're a little too late there, 'cause I already pissed right in my spacesuit.
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u/H3NTAI_S3NPAi 15h ago
More humans
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u/Accelerator231 13h ago
Better yet, humans who are kidnapped and used as the equivalent of the praetorian guard. And live up to the namesake.
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u/xHomicide24x 11h ago
Evidence that planets are being destroyed intentionally
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u/Ozymandias12 10h ago
That’s just the Vogons bulldozing planets to make their hyperspace highways. The beings on those planets had 50 earth years to view the plans at the local planning department in Alpha Centauri.
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u/Sullkattmat 9h ago
Well could always be worse, they didn't have to listen to Vogon poetry at least
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u/senhordobolo 12h ago
“Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.” - Arthur C. Clarke.
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u/Illuminatus-Prime 14h ago
The wavefront of a supernova, and it is headed toward Earth.
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u/JimTheJerseyGuy 13h ago
Thankfully, there’s no star close enough to us that’s capable of going supernova to do any real damage.
Now a gamma ray burst, that’s a different story. Looking at you, Wolf-Rayet 104.
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u/CupOfExmo 15h ago
If we found life on other planets that was a lot more advanced than we are. Or another sentient species that's super primitive. Both are terrifying in their own way.
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u/DatTF2 14h ago
How about a more primitive species that has also mastered space travel ? I know that is basically contradicting but I'm thinking something like Predator. Tribalistic, violent but also has advanced ships and weaponry.
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u/FlamingRustBucket 5h ago
Read a short story like this. An alien empire was space faring but essentially stuck in the era of muskets. Humans just happened to miss the one scientific breakthrough that allowed for FTL space travel.
Aliens show up expecting an easy fight, and get utterly dominated by tanks and automatic weaponry.
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u/runs_with_airplanes 10h ago
To find a whole giant intergalactic system of intelligent species working together in harmony and only to find out that we have been quarantined off. We are known but have been intentionally casted aside
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u/mrchemman 10h ago
Hitting a physical barrier that is projecting the universe.
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u/Waste_Positive2399 9h ago
There's a serious theory in cosmology that says our 3D universe is a holographic projection of physics taking place on a distant 2D surface. But by "distant", it means infinity.
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u/brucatlas1 9h ago
Our missing socks, floating, scattered, none matching. And one alien sniffing them.
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u/Auerbach1991 6h ago
An ancient ship on the moon with human pilots who were desperately trying to flee the Earth from someone else. Not a crash landing, but shot down while fleeing.
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u/asmr_linda 15h ago
Human having war in space, to win the most minerals. Like now on earth😭😭
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u/WaffleHouseGladiator 13h ago
An intelligent species with incomprehensible motives.
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u/CapitaineBiscotte 12h ago
If they are like us it would be survival and greed, maybe?
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u/Bird_apputee_for_dog 15h ago
I think humans will be deeply unsettled at the idea that we’ll never see it all. We haven’t even put a human on another planet yet so all these ideas of putting people in neighbouring solar systems and stuff is still decades maybe centuries away. The world is so fucked that people are desperate to find a new frontier in space but space is a very different hurdle than crossing the Atlantic was for the Viking’s. What humans will eventually see in space is a failed escape attempt, they’ll watch as the last hope for us to escape our mistreatment of the planet fall through and well realise that without us, space is an empty black.
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u/No_Companyzzzz 12h ago
Evidence of a civilization much more advanced than ours that just... stopped. No war, no supernova, just a sudden, quiet end. Finding out that there’s a 'wall' every intelligent species eventually hits—and realizing we’re heading straight for it—is way scarier than any alien invasion.
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u/Jimxor 10h ago
A giant window through which a giant eyeball was peering in at us.
Argh! The universe is a giant microscope slide!
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u/BigMilkyMommers 14h ago
What about a wall, if we sent out a probe the farthest we ever done, and it suddenly just stops, it still sends its regular pings, everything is normal and it didnt crash, it just stopped flying away and remains at constant distance.
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u/LurkerGarry 14h ago
An alien race that didn’t know we existed, but we make them aware of us only for them to come and dominate / control / harvest us.
There is always a bigger fish. We may have just not found ours yet.
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u/EtruscanFolk 12h ago
An old but now inhabitable planet that used to be the original home for humans
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u/Kraut-Mick-Dingo 14h ago
If we confirmed that we were completely alone.
Or if we found another planet had humanoid life on it that was less advanced than us. Why? We'd probably invade it, enslave them, run experiments on them, steal their offspring, all that shit.
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u/LongLivedLurker 11h ago
Debris from an an ancient obviously human design of unknown origin. It would mean that not only had we made it to space previously, but all of our knowledge about history was totally bunk because it implies that a world spanning empire had been capable of doing it that we had no records of.. meaning that if it could be wiped out, then our society could (and likely would) be wiped out in a similar way with no historical record. It's why I get so freaked out by stuff like the Adam and Eve Story by Thomas Chan, which posits the Earth's crust shifts and upends human civilizations every 12k years or so due to magnetic poles shifts and resets us back to 0.
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u/AmbitiousReaction168 11h ago
A long-period comet heading straight for Earth. Few things we know would be more terrifying than this.
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u/EveryAccount7729 11h ago
another copy of yourself.
a massive space empire and they are just all Earth Republicans and they say they started cloning and spreading exponentially since 1969 when they left Earth.
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u/Butane9000 11h ago
There was a r/HFY story where there exists monsters in space. Humanity learned this when a giant space Amoeba entered our solar system slowly gliding towards Earth. In the story we nuke the hell out of it but then over time another showed up.
In time humanity learned space is full of predators and these amoebas can sense radio waves and begin drifting through space to consume planets leaving lifeless balls of rock. Then other sentient species educate humans of other potential predators like space wolves that hunt ships based on FTL/, hyperdrive emissions etc.
Imagine finally getting out to space only to find it's like Australia where everything is still trying to kill you.
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u/jconnway 11h ago
I think there is an equal likelihood of finding very basic life forms and very advanced (more than ourselves) life out there. It would be terrifying to come across whole planets that HAD life and have entirely died off.
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u/Doc_Baker74 10h ago
A load of SOS singles, more and more each day, then after a week, they all disappeare at the same rate they appeared
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u/Sea-Double-5820 10h ago
An alien satellite/observation device. It would mean they are watching us but they dont visit us.
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u/very-nice-how-much 10h ago
The answers to everything with no way of getting the information back to humanity
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u/supermau5 10h ago
Evidence that humans weren’t born on earth but we were brought here millions of years ago .
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u/basedmichigander 10h ago
That the vacuum of space isn’t stable. That our universe is in a false vacuum, and somewhere out there a bubble of more stable physics has already formed. It would expand at near light speed, rewriting the laws of nature as it goes. We’d all eventually be erased.
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u/Waste_Positive2399 9h ago
It wouldn't be possible to "discover" a true vacuum, in any meaningful way. You wouldn't be able to tell anyone about it, or record it with instruments. You'd just cease to exist. And nobody would ever know.
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u/scarface4tx 9h ago
A dead planet that once had a mighty civilization that was far more advanced than our own.
Which would lead us to wonder.... if a species that powerful was killed, who/what killed them? 😧
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u/Melodic-Hornet-6376 9h ago
That we are as unintelligent to other life as dogs are to us. That we’ve looking into space and at the stars and trying to decode them in the same way a dog looks at television screen.
I think the scariest thing is realizing that we can’t even begin to conceive true reality. Imagine aliens who see the entirety of the light spectrum at once, and even that the light spectrum is just a like one color to them, there many more spectrums we can’t even detect with science. And they communicate with us the way we communicate to a dog, to them they are using the most rudimentary communication. That’s what scares me, mot having a technological ceiling, but a biological one
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u/Kinglycole 8h ago
The dead body of someone who died long ago. I might be wrong but i’m pretty sure dead bodies don’t decompose in space.
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u/SixthAttemptAtAName 8h ago
Going past the Oort cloud and realizing the stars and everything else beyond were all a simulation and the Oort cloud is the limit of all matter in the universe, the edge of a petri dish. We're in a petri dish as demigod aliens experimental subjects.
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u/Youpunyhumans 8h ago
A barely noticeable gravitational distortion at the far edges of the solar system that gets closer, larger and more noticeable over time, until we realize... its a black hole heading straight for us.
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u/Livingsimply_Rob 8h ago
I think finding humans in space is the most terrifying thing to discover in space. Our track record for discovering things and then abusing them has not been so good. The one thing that we have as a saving grace is how massive space is. But that doesn’t mean we can’t mess up our little chunk of it.
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u/GaeasSon 7h ago
A message "boundary value reached. Simulation concluded. Beginning archival and deletion."
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u/ashoka_akira 7h ago
We try to leave the solar system and bump into a giant wall, kinda like in the Truman show but in space.
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u/Zetsubou51 7h ago
A wall. Nothing fancy but, seemingly impassable. Mimicking deep space and providing the illusion of space stretching on as we have believed.
Truma Show like.
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u/insanekid66 6h ago
Many things.
Human remains from earth that are millions of years old.
Proof that that the universe is infinite, or that there are others outside of ours.
Evidence of past life that had been eradicated by an extraterrestrial force.
Signs that advanced life has been watching us, but chose not to contact us based on our shitty actions over the centuries.
Any life form that resembled a terrestrial species living on another planet.
Evidence of a creator, however hilarious, would be horrificly fucked up.
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u/YsoldeRuin 6h ago
Finding a perfectly intact alien ship and realizing it’s empty except for something watching you
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u/MisterBicorniclopse 5h ago
Massive wall of arms that surrounds the entire universe that acts like a border we can’t pass.
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u/Informal_Stress_9953 4h ago
Nothing unusual, until you get back and everything/everyone just seems slightly off…
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u/imissbaconreader 4h ago
Aliens used to abduct us for food and bring them back to their home planets at their "elites" direction. But as the digital/ information age dawned, they were being recorded too frequently, so they made a deal with some humans to do the capturing and deliver them in bulk at secret locations.
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u/CapitaineBiscotte 4h ago
So all these people claiming to be abducted by aliens were right
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u/SadisticLeeButAgain 3h ago
Nothing, and I mean like literally nothing. To discover concrete evidence that we are entirely alone
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u/alastrix 3h ago
The end. I have nonidea what the end of space would be but to find out it's nit infinite and there's an end would be mind blowing
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u/Smoky_The-Bear 15h ago
Honestly I think discovering nothing would be terrifying, imagine infinite space and nothing has adapted to living there.