The Cosmic Chatter of Doom
A Lovecraftian View of Recent NASA Activities
“I am not the first… I will reluctantly become the audient for the talking void.”
— Andrew Migliore
For anyone who has missed the recent news, NASA has recorded (not for the first time) the horrific cosmic wailings from pressure waves emanating from a black hole deep in the Perseus galaxy cluster. The difference this time is that they have now translated those unimaginable waves into sounds within the range of human hearing. Clearly, NASA has nothing better to do than to usher in the downfall of the human race.
Neural typical people, not indoctrinated into the cosmic realities, have described the sound as “spooky,” “haunting,” and even “ethereal.” But we who attend “the only festival that understands” know what we are really dealing with. Personally having played way too much Delta Green, there is little room left for doubt or sanity.
I’m not sure exactly what is trying to make its way through the cold reaches of space from the feeble light of half-dead stars to tap us on the shoulder. The Old Ones, as we know, walk serene and primal, undimensioned and to us unseen… but appartently they also have a salon and are chatting it up “aut delectare aut prodesse!”
I know what everyone is thinking… the tag line from the movie Alien, “In space, no one can hear you scream!” Unfortunately for us, a galaxy cluster, opposed to empty space, has copious amounts of gas that envelop the hundreds or even thousands of galaxies within it, providing a perfectly adequet medium for the presure waves from the Old Ones to travel through. Yes the universe is indeed comic but the joke is on mankind!
It is interesting to note, that the original recordings by NASA are some 57 octaves below middle C and can only be heard by the Hounds of Tindalos. But some genius in the name of science created a new sonification that translated this astronomical data into sound that us mere and insignificant humans can hear (upto 288 quadrillion times higher than their original frequency)! What would Professor Quatermass say?
“There’s no room for personal feelings in science.” — Professor Bernard Quatermass
On the bright side, over five million miles from Earth, a NASA spacecraft crashed head-on into a 525-foot-wide asteroid known as Dimorphos at 14,000 mph. This was the first real-world test of our planetary defense system, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART). DART has proven that we can place a spacecraft millions of miles away and precisely hit a target only 500 feet across. That is some amazing cosmic billiards!
To learn more about science gone awry, see our double feature of Re-Animator and Bride of Re-Animator with special guest actor Jeffrey Combs or one of our many short films such as Tim Travers & the Time Traveler’s Paradox at the 27th annual H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival.
About the Author
Andrew Migliore is the author of Lurker in the Lobby: A Guide to the Cinema of H.P. Lovecraft and founder of the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival® and CthulhuCon™. During daylight hours he is sometimes a VP of Engineering at an AI/ML startup.
