this post was submitted on 12 Dec 2025
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Cosmic Horror

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A community to discuss Cosmic Horror in it's many forms; books, films, comics, art, TV, music, RPGs, video games etc.

"cosmic horror... is a subgenre of horror fiction and weird fiction that emphasizes the horror of the unknowable and incomprehensible more than gore or other elements of shock... themes of cosmic dread, forbidden and dangerous knowledge, madness, non-human influences on humanity, religion and superstition, fate and inevitability, and the risks associated with scientific discoveries... the sense that ordinary life is a thin shell over a reality that is so alien and abstract in comparison that merely contemplating it would damage the sanity of the ordinary person, insignificance and powerlessness at the cosmic scale..."

#Horror, #Cosmic Horror, #science fiction,

For more Lovecraft & Mythos-inspired Cosmic Horror:-!lovecraft_mythos@lemmy.world

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[–] Eq0@literature.cafe 3 points 12 hours ago (2 children)

Your use of the word “exponentially” triggered my inner math teacher: no, the growth is not exponential but more than linear since the industrial revolution.

[–] Jimjim@lemmy.world 2 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

Is it not exponential? Dont human births exponentially increase? And if thats the case, dont death increase exponentially?

Or am I wrong about births too?

[–] thevoidzero@lemmy.world 2 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

If a couple have 2 children, then in an ideal condition the population is constant, so the death/birth is linear. Human birth can be exponentially if every couple have more than 2 children and they also have more than 2 and so on in this ideal scenario with no early deaths.

In reality you need 2+some fraction to balance out the early deaths, other couples with no children, unmarried, etc.

Plus with limited resources, population can't grow a lot because you'll start having a lot of death due to starvation, conflicts, accidents, etc.

Problem is due to industrialization, we can now support higher number of humans compared to the past, and due to vaccines and medicines we have smaller numbers of early deaths, so we have a population growth problem. But as we hit our limits it'll stabilize, or if we overshoot, it'll go down.

[–] Eq0@literature.cafe 1 points 10 hours ago

There is an additional element to it: along human history the birth rate has been usually significantly higher than 2, but that was compensated by a significantly higher death rate too. So the number of deaths definitely did not increase a huge lot over the last hundred years.

[–] jaybone@lemmy.zip 1 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

Couldn’t anything O() of linear be modeled as exponential?

[–] Eq0@literature.cafe 1 points 10 hours ago

Exponential would be O(x^n) for any n. X^2 is O(x) but not exponential.