Is Space Hot?

During my convalescence, I spent a lot of time thinking about space. This was partly the expected result of week-long confinement in my studio apartment (which resembles a tree house given its size and the amount of foliage that both surrounds and inhabits it). But my increased interest in space was also prompted by the fact that space has been in the zeitgeist lately. Space is "in" again, as evidenced by the SpaceX explorations, UFOs (ahem, balloons) flying over the US-Canada border, the Miss America costume, Rauw Alejandro’s Saturno, Tom Cruise announcing he will film a movie in space, Skim’s latest “out of this world” campaign, the endless barrage of space-related film and TV that floats like debris around us, and probably more. Now that I list all this, it seems as if Space has never been “out”. Regardless, it’s “in”.

Against this backdrop, at some point over the last six months, one of my dear friends took a profound liking to space after watching Space Odyssey. There's a link, you see, between her research about a Sumerian priestess-poet named Enheduanna and astronomy. In Sumerian, she told me, the same word is used for both Letters and Stars. Over Thanksgiving, she took me to the Planetarium; we were both enthralled by the metaphors. In parallel, a good friend from university studies exoplanets. He will often send pictures of his latest research over text, and, in parties, go on little rants about the disservice that astrology has paid to his profession (likely in response to my introducing him as an astrologer rather than an astronomer, just for kicks). Last fall, these two friends collided, like platonic asteroids, at a party I hosted, causing an acceleration of space-related thematics in my day-to-day communications. I now act as a kind of messenger between curiosity and knowledge—"can you please ask him why we can see the Milky Way Galaxy if we are technically inside of it?"

It's been hard to escape Space in this environment, but the universe’s encroaching presence in my life was further accentuated this past week during The Illness after I stumbled into a Polish mini-series called A Girl and an Astronaut. While watching this show, Space was suddenly everywhere: I encountered this thread about the similarities between human ashes under a microscopes and galaxies, then watched Linoleum, Hello Tomorrow!, and The Crown's moon landing episode, appreciated Heidi Lamarr's headdress in this picture, and, since COVID has made it hard to enjoy music that's in any way exciting, listened to a playlist about being lost in space over and over again.

Initially, I thought that I would write a dispatch about A Girl and an Astronaut, a fascinating TV show about a space journey gone awry, given the concerted effort that goes into the "construction of Hotness" as a central motivating force in the plot (Face jewels! DJs! Alien Parties! Air force pilots racing in the sunset!). But as the fever dissipated and I returned to my senses, I noticed the broader number of cosmic coincidences. Suddenly there was only one question in my mind: is Space Hot? This is the question we shall embark on answering today.

Is Space hot?

Before we begin, however, while we've long acknowledged that we seek the ephemeral sources of Hotness in beings and things rather than physical traits, with a question like "Is Space Hot?", it is important that I first answer the question "is Space hot?". I'm concerned that if I don't address our doubts about the literal temperature of space, I'll lose you to Google (or worse, Bing).

"Space" cannot be hot or cold. I don't think I can do this explanation justice on my own, so I'll just let our friends at space.org explain: "[Space] doesn’t actually have a temperature at all. Temperature is a measurement of the speed at which particles are moving, and heat is how much energy the particles of an object have. So in a truly empty region of space, there would be no particles and radiation, meaning there’s also no temperature."

Objects in space, however, can have temperature. The most common "thing" in space is it's "background"—Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), the microwave radiation that fills up all of space—and it is very cold at a cute 2.7 K (-454⁰F/-270⁰C). Also known as "fossil radiation", CMB dates back to the Big Bang, and is the "cooled remnant of the first light that could ever travel freely throughout the Universe". CMB started off rather hot (3,000 K / 5,000° F/ 2,726⁰C), but as the universe has continued to expand from its denser and hotter stage, it has only become colder.

Against this chilly background, there are a lot of things in Space, some which are hot and some of which are cold. Stars, for example, are typically hot, whereas Uranus and Neptune are decidedly not. The area immediately nearer stars is hot, too, but if you're in the shadow of an object (on the dark side of Mercury, for example), it's going to be terribly cold. Apparently Uranus is the coldest planet in our solar system. It is much colder than Neptune—despite being much closer to the sun—because at some point it crashed against an "earth-sized object", which made it orbit at an "extreme tilt". (If you want to be hot, Uranus seems to suggest that we should avoid collisions at all costs.)

Finally, I'm sure you're wondering about black holes—it looks like the disk that surrounds a black hole can be very hot, but once you're inside one, under General Relativity theory, they are totally black and have no temperature at all. However, Stephen Hawking opened the possibility of black holes having a little bit of "temperature", though we remain very close to absolute zero (though not exactly zero, given that, according to Hawking, black holes emit some amount of moving particles, which makes it looks like they emit radiation, and therefore have a temperature of something like 0.00000006 K).

I could go on and on about all the various objects in space and all their various temperatures, but we have a more important question to answer.

Is Space Hot?

After two weeks marinating in all things Space, I’ve come to the realization that like the real Space, the concept of Space is a broader environs filled up with a lot of things; only some of those things are Hot while many others are not. I'll be here for years if I try to list out what is and isn't Hot within and around Space, so I'll limit myself to a discussion of Space as a concept, rather than it's satellite professions, cultural creations, theories, forces, and imaginary or real inhabitants. There may be a part two to this dispatch about the surroundings of the Space Concept and their Hotness, we’ll see, but for now that is beyond the scope of this dispatch. I acknowledge, further, that there are many ways to tackle this question, and I am sure that there will be disagreement among the Hot community subscribed to this newsletter, so I beg for patience and request responses if you feel strongly in any other direction. In the meantime, here is my conclusion, along with the supporting reasoning:

I would posit that the concept of Space is Hot.

Space as a concept is Hot because has a strong gravitational pull (metaphorically speaking); it attracts obsession as the most sublime representation of a horizon beyond our own. Space has mesmerized us for almost all of human existence—Enheduanna, who lived about 4,300 years ago, was the "world's first astronomer," and since she looked up at the stars and interpreted their messages about about her reign and when to breed animals, hundreds of millions of souls, royal and ignoble alike, have looked up to our night sky and imagined worlds, heavens, and universes beyond our own. Space brings us a capacity for faith, awe, and wonder. Space provides an escape for when life on this planet feels too fragile, painful, or contested. Space is an epitome of beauty, magnificence, toward which we can aspire.

At the same time, Space is Hot because it isn't only a tool for dreams, imagination, or a higher spiritual order, it also has more tangible uses. The glimmering whispers of light in our night skies carry messages about how our world, a small pocket in a much larger ecosystem, is organized. Enheduanna, as High-Priestess of Nanna-Suen, the moon deity, practiced astronomy not only for ceremonial purposes, but also practical ones. Like many others before and after her, Enheduanna observed the phases of the moon and movement of stars to keep track of time and to support agricultural activities. We rely on the stars to guide our paths and tell us sweet nothings about our past, present, and future.

Furthermore, Space is Hot because it is a constant reminder that we are small, meaningless, fragile microbes in the vast expanse of it all. Does Hotness need to be humbling? I don’t think so, but for the concept of Space, this is a critical quality. As big as our problems may feel in the bright, relentless daylight, as soon as the Earth turns and darkness covers our lands, we're reminded that we're not unique, important, or likely even alone. It doesn't matter that your marketing plan fell through, or that your dog threw up on your white carpet, or that you seem incapable to keep a houseplant alive. You're an infinitesimal speck in the broader context of the universe, where stars are born and die each second; where, when we look up, we look to the past; and where timescales are of thousands, millions of years therefore a human lifetime is not even a tenth of a percent of the time that matters out there. Space is a Hot, humbling son of a gun.

Finally, and most importantly, like Wellington, Space is Hot because it both invites and evades us. Space draws us in with its stunning, shining jewels each night, and then deftly pushes us away with its inhospitable conditions, distance, and enormity. As much as Space ignites our curiosity over dinner parties or planetarium visits, it will never be truly known to us. It will always maintain its mystery, its danger. Space represents opportunity, possibility, dreams, utopia in their purest form—seemingly within reach but impossible to grasp.

And yet, we, silly simple humans, continue chasing the impossible; we launch ourselves in metal bullets at vicious speeds in an attempt to penetrate a measureless unknown in search of answers about who we are. As I reflect on the ephemeral Hotness of space, I descend into a worry I often have about human beings: our oblivious, self-obsessed compulsion to prove ourselves to, well, ourselves. Don’t get me wrong, I believe we must indulge in our curiosity, especially when it is about something as arresting as Space, but we shouldn’t kid ourselves into believing that The Answers—the silver bullet of our deepest, most existential doubts—are out there simply because Space is mesmerizing… and Hot.

In Linoleum, a film about a man grappling with his inability to become an astronaut (someone who swims in the stars) and instead remains an astronomer (someone who merely watches stars), a doctor points at the protagonist's head and poses a simple provocation: "perhaps the universe in our head is more real than reality itself". Each time that we launch ourselves into the infinite possibilities of the universe, I believe we’re merely looking for a metaphor to the study of the human mind. As fond as I am of metaphors, however, I am suspicious of their ability to cloak the truth in their attempt to clarify. And yet, to resist metaphor is hard “because you actually have to endure the thing itself, which hurts for some reason.” (Marie Howe to Krista Tippett) Why do we fear Space less than we do our own minds? Must we seek distance, an other, in order to better define who we really are? Would it be Hotter, I wonder, to seek understand ourselves in ourselves, first? Might it feel more honest to acknowledge that what we’re looking for in the abyss is nothing other than ourselves?

Subscribe?