I'm not sure how long I've been doing it, but every few months I feel the urge to listen to this. It feels like a re-grounding in an aesthetic and emotional truth of the universe.
The conditions opposing life are dominant by a large margin. Gamma ray bursts, solar flares, asteroid impacts, black holes, radiation, inhospitable planets - everywhere you look there's the pitiless reality of this awesome dark vastness.
Alien was one of the first science fiction films I saw. To date there have been scant others that have been able to make me feel as though I was a million light years from earth.
The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is astonishment: and astonishment is that state of the soul in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it. Hence arises the great power of the sublime, that, far from being produced by them, it anticipates our reasonings, and hurries us on by an irresistible force. Astonishment, as I have said, is the effect of the sublime in its highest degree; the inferior effects are admiration, reverence, and respect. -Edmund Burke
Whereas the beautiful is limited, the sublime is limitless, so that the mind in the presence of the sublime, attempting to imagine what it cannot, has pain in the failure but pleasure in contemplating the immensity of the attempt. ― Immanuel Kant