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“Amid the vastness of the things among which we live, the existence of nothingness holds the first place.” —The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci
Nothingness, or “nonbeing,” challenges human thought: It denotes an absolute absence of existence, which renders our conceptions of space, matter, and duration obsolete. Because it resists representation, nothingness constitutes a central theme in science fiction, where it often exposes the limits of thought, communication, or technological development. The Polish writer Stanisław Lem explored this theme in original ways, notably in his short story “How the World Was Saved,” which opens the collection The Cyberiad (1965).
In this tale, a man invents a machine capable of producing anything whose name begins with the letter n. When asked to do nothing, the machine did nothing in its own way: one by one, things were removed from the world, until it came at the cost of the machine’s own disappearance. Lem uses absurd humor here to underscore the unthinkable nature of nothingness and the tension between language, technology, and existence. This story also highlights the evolutionary limits of human cognition. As Homo sapiens, human beings possess a brain shaped by evolutionary pressures to survive within the terrestrial environment—situated somewhere between the macroscopic and the microscopic, between galaxies and elementary particles. As a result, cognitive capacities are attuned to phenomena that have influenced human biological evolution, but they remain ill-equipped to grasp aspects of the universe that played no role in the development of human encephalization.
Nothingness, in this sense, has exerted no selective pressure on the human species. It lies outside the scope of human intuition. This is why human beings—and by extension, the machines they design—cannot truly think nothingness. At best, people can name it, symbolize it, or treat it as a metaphor for the outer limits of thought.
And yet, nothingness remains inescapable. It seems to precede the ordering of the world, as if it stood at the very origin of creation—not as a primary or superior reality, but as a radical absence that resists any representation. Nothingness eludes the categories of reason, particularly that of time. It invalidates the very idea of structured temporality: Within it, the past, the present, and the future cannot function as coherent, logical markers of understanding.
Nothingness compels societies to produce symbolic and cultural responses to ward off the fear of chaos, arbitrariness, and indeterminacy.
Nothingness is impossible for human thought to truly conceive.1 Not only because it entails the nonexistence of all things—matter, energy, atoms—but because it implies the absolute absence of space, time, and form: a reality situated beyond any physical, natural, or social ordering.
Works of science fiction, such as Lem’s “How the World Was Saved,” seek to transcend this cognitive boundary. They explore nothingness through scenarios that immerse characters in an inner emptiness. Two more recent examples of this can be found in the film Spaceman (2024), where an astronaut faces extreme interstellar isolation; and, in a different register, the animated series The Midnight Gospel (2020), which features a space radio host who explores simulated alternate worlds. Through his encounters—a president of the universe, a reindeer-dog, Death—he confronts his own finitude.
Spaceman follows the journey of Jakub, an astronaut who embarks on a months‑long solo mission to study Chopra, a mysterious cloud phenomenon near Jupiter. Confronted with the vast nothingness of space, he gradually begins to lose touch with reality. A telepathic spider appears aboard his ship, guiding him through an intimate exploration of himself. Whether this spider exists objectively or emerges solely from Jakub’s imagination remains ambiguous; yet his confrontation with nothingness initiates a return to the most elemental aspects of his identity. For example, Jakub is forced to confront is loneliness, his falling marriage, and the guilt tied to his father’s past. Through his encounters with the spider, he recognizes how these buried truths have shaped him and begins to reassess what truly matters. This suggests that sidereal nothingness may constitute an inevitable step through which one must pass to reach the fundamental principles that bind human beings together. The disappearance—and eventual death—of the spider at the conclusion of Jakub’s initiatory journey signals the end of his confrontation with existential void and this reorientation toward human connection, thereby underscoring the idea that the experience of nothingness is inseparable from a rediscovery of what makes humanity unique.
The notion of a constructive relationship with nothingness is further illustrated in the Midnight Gospel episode “Turtles of the Eclipse.” In this animated, psychedelic narrative, the protagonist Clancy—a space-traveling podcaster—lands on a planet shaped like an immense hollow sphere, an image suggestive of existential emptiness. There, he encounters the personification of Death, who asks him: “What does death look like to you?” Clancy’s hesitant and introspective response reveals his difficulty in articulating an experience that resists representation, illustrating the challenge of giving tangible form to such an elusive concept. Death then develops a critique of a “capitalist model of death,” whereby societies preserve corpses (through chemical embalming) in order to present grieving families with bodies resembling the living as closely as possible. This practice, she suggests, distracts from death’s true nature. Instead, Death advocates for spending more time with the dead—both literally and symbolically—as a transformative confrontation with nothingness. The episode ultimately proposes that accepting one’s flawed and discordant self may be more authentic and sustaining than striving for an illusory state of perfect enlightenment.
These two works of contemplative science fiction—a film and an animated series—use space and technology as metaphors for existential anxiety and metaphysical solitude. They act as mirrors of interiority rather than battlefields. In this sense, the subgenre stands apart from space opera, which is more narrative-driven and spectacular, depicting interstellar conflicts within vast galactic empires. Yet the distinction is not absolute: some posthuman space operas, such as Stars and Bones (2022) and The Final Architecture (2021–2023)—both literary works—also integrate existential emptiness. Their survivors drift through sidereal unknowns, haunted by the ruins of a vanished humanity.
And yet, beyond the existential and metaphysical anxiety it provokes, nothingness also constitutes an ontological opening: it compels societies to produce symbolic and cultural responses to ward off the fear of chaos, arbitrariness, and indeterminacy. As the historian of science Lorraine Daston demonstrates, concepts we often take as self-evident—such as scientific objectivity, moral norms, or administrative rules—have long and contingent histories. These are not the gradual revelations of an intrinsic world order, but collective constructions forged to establish intelligibility in the face of uncertainty. Objectivity, norms, and rules are attempts to domesticate nothingness and tame chaos.
In contemporary societies, the automation of daily life—through algorithms and the widespread use of generative artificial intelligence—paradoxically brings to the surface a deeper sense of unease.2 Humans increasingly delegate to machines the task of setting the coordinates of the world, of drawing the line between right and wrong, truth and falsehood. The proliferation of what Daston refers to as “thin rules”—explicit, codified, and exhaustive down to the smallest detail—tends to produce a kind of void: a nothingness left by the withdrawal of human judgment. This standardization displaces lived experience and moral intuition, both of which are essential for making sense of action and giving depth to history. Beneath this hyperregulated order emerges a “void of meaning,” where individual and collective capacity for interpretation becomes suspect. This disembodiment of the connection between rules and the turbulence of human life risks deepening the existential anxiety associated with nothingness.
Ultimately, nothingness fractures our relationship to time, exposing its constructed, fragile, and contingent nature. In confronting this void, societies strive to weave together continuity and causality—but the very need to do so reveals that time is not self-evident. It is an ordering fiction, without which history, memory, and action begin to unravel. 
This article was commissioned by Matthew Wolf-Meyer.
- Nothingness must be clearly distinguished from nihilism, which is neither a variant nor a diluted version of “nonbeing.” Nihilism is an ideology rather than a category of thought. It expresses a philosophy of refusal: a denial of the possibility of meaning or truth, whether at the individual or collective level. Nihilism’s manifestations are manifold—moral, political, cultural—but one strand of nihilism connects more directly to the idea of nothingness. The world thus unveiled is marked by decadence, that is, by a vital loss of meaning, a fundamental inhumanity, and a profound denaturing of life itself. ↩
- Virginie Tournay, Le vivant est-il gouvernable?: Le politique à l’épreuve d’un monde saturé de traces (Éditions de l’Aube, 2024). ↩
