Cosmic Diving

You are prepared. You have the airplane, and your best winter furs. You have the backing of the world's most prominent university and some talented graduate students. You have photographic films, flashlights, and notebooks. You have read both the classic and the fresh literature and have equipped the latest scientific method. Only one thing is new - your field site. One not seen or documented before. On a remote continent, behind a mountain range.

You see what there is to be seen. You do not wish to see that again. You do not wish for anyone to see that again. How do you convince the world that some secrets are best left untouched? Would any report or story or book do that message justice?

You are now a detective trying to connect the sudden death of your uncle and some newspaper clippings to a mystical underwater city in the South Pacific. The 21st century scientists drop the cheeky yet olden direct citations of Mendeleev's table, Euler's beam equation, and Ramon y Cajal drawings of neurons. You only get to go off the scattered police reports from rural Louisiana, a tiny figurine with tentacles and wings, and a centuries old dark book written by a mad Arab.

You are now a fisher trying to make ends meet. People tell you to not go out at night, but why really? Maybe because you don't know if your next catch is a fish, or a deformed mutant skeleton, or is altogether larger than your boat.

You are now the director of a government agency that deals with the incomprehensible. Your first task is to find out what the agency does. Can you still find the control points where your applied efforts would be most rewarded? Why do you even have a guy on the staff whose full-time job is to stare at a refrigerator? Also, what is up with that writer whose prose turns into reality when he is near a lake? Why did your people set up a thousand typewriters trying to replicate his style? If you train the typewriters on their own output, wouldn't that just lead to model collapse as it does with LLMs? Or will the writer finally get out by diving deep to the surface?

We pretend that we understand the universe. Ask the nearest cosmologist or astronomer. They will tell you about the main sequence of stars, white dwarfs, neutron stars and the black hole at the center of our galaxy. They would say that even stars are trivial because we have observed and cataloged the galaxy clusters, the filaments and large scale structure, the cosmic microwave background and its fluctuations. They would tout the dawn of multimessenger astronomy, where we observe both the electromagnetic waves (light and radiowaves) and the gravitational waves (disturbance in the spacetime itself). They will recite the freshest count of exoplanets and tell you how the exoplanet spectra let us find Earth-like worlds. Except for, we can never go there, light years away. And we can never know if something is coming from there.

There is an old trick in storytelling. You establish a very powerful character, someone who commands many resources, has a lot of knowledge, and is in control of the situation. Make sure your audience respects the authority of this character. And then say who this character is terrified of. They know how to hire a boogeyman when you need one. But they are afraid of the one you hire to kill the boogeyman. The Baba Yaga. But for you, the brave explorer of the field site beyond the mountains, it is something else. It is the great civilization and their millenia long history depicted in the murals. It is the greatest worker they ever created and their downfall. It is the shoggoth.

I am a theorist. I do armchair science. It is safe, it is chill. I do need to dive into new fields, repeatedly. I go to a new body of literature, and it always starts out looking infinite. Every paper and book leads to a dozen more, none of the researcher names or theoretical concepts ring a bell. The horizon of knowledge created by other humans stretches out exponentially - until it suddenly doesn't. One day you read yet another 101 tutorial in your new field and don't learn anything new. You start recognizing common names, structures, leitmotifs. You are not an expert yet, but you yell into the abyss and hear an echo. Brick by brick you reconstruct the wall of knowledge and frame the tiniest hole in it, the question that nobody asked, the parametric regime that nobody focused on. Now that is something that you can fill, perhaps with your own paper or a well-scoped PhD dissertation. The dissertation you write, or the one you advise.

Cosmic horror is stories about researchers, investigators, void-yellers who do not hear an echo. Their knowledge grows, but they have no idea if the scope of what they learned is comparable to the size of what there is to learn about their subject. Perhaps, as a sickly writer asked a hundred years ago, the grand total of what humanity has learned and achieved is but an insignificant speck in all of the cosmos. But perhaps that is not a cause for desperation, but a call to keep digging deeper for evidence, reading old books, unraveling conspiracies, putting pictures up on the board and linking them with a red thread, even when you don't know how big a board you would need.