There’s a popular quote circulating around that goes something along the lines of “Born too late to explore the Earth, born too early to explore the Galaxy”. Honestly, to me, that quote is little more than justification for people who don’t want to do anything with their lives because they can’t be great explorers (even though there’s still the ocean, and plenty of uncharted regions on the planet), but that’s not really why I brought it up. The point that I was trying to make is that the human spirit is one that thrives on exploration, to the point where the “fact” that there are no more things left to explore is enough to bring people to depression. But what if I told you that, aside from the examples I gave you just now, there’s still one more place that you can explore? One more uncharted frontier that you could begin exploring right away? I am, of course, talking about cyberspace.

The Internet is huge, and I mean HUGE. It’s so big that most people can’t even comprehend just how big it is. Let me put it this way – imagine every single website that you’ve ever visited in your entire life. It doesn’t matter if you frequent it, or if you just went there once three years ago. Just think of literally every single site you’ve ever been to, imagine them all together, like a ball. Now imagine all the websites that you haven’t been to because they’re outside of your interests – all those sites about, say, dog breeding or Mesopotamian art or flower growing or whatever it is that you would never visit because you don’t care about it. How big would the ball become now? A hundred times bigger? A thousand times? A hundred thousand times? Honestly, it doesn’t really matter just how big that ball is, because all of the sites that you can possibly visit on the Internet comprise only 0.03% of it. It is THAT huge.

What about the rest 99.97%? Well, that’s what you might call the Deep Web – sites, domains and databases which are not listed by Google and are completely inaccessible through standard means. Now, I know that many of you have heard some terrifying stories about the Deep Web, but I assure you – the majority of it is completely innocent. We’re talking stuff like servers and databases for companies, “premium” access for websites that you can’t get through without a username and password, that kind of thing. Without the proper credentials, or some pretty decent hacking skills, chances are you’re not getting into the Deep Web… But even if you do, you’re not going to find much of value. But that’s not to say that all of the Deep Web is safe. No, there’s a small corner of it that you would most definitely like to avoid. Now THAT is known as the Dark Web.

Now, keep in mind that you can’t really stumble across the Dark Web by accident. It’s not like you’re going to be scouring around for the best rated bingo bonuses and will suddenly find some horrific stuff – you’ll need to deliberately look it up through the use of the browser Tor. I’m not going to give you any more details than that (I’m sure you can find them on your own if you really want to), but suffice to say, I personally wouldn’t advise even the most adventurous of you to venture into the Dark Web. I mean, most of it’s kinda harmless – there’s file sharing sites, search engines, nothing that you can’t really find on the surface web as well. Hell, some of the stuff is actually kind of unintentionally hilarious, such as forums for people who believe they are demons or vampires, or that they can summon these creatures. But then there’s all the dark stuff… Now, again, keep in mind that you’re usually not going to just stumble across it, you need to be deliberately looking it up, but let me tell you, it’s things that you don’t want to touch. We’re talking weapons and drugs trading on the soft end of the spectrum, child pornography and abuse in the middle and details of illegal human experimentations on the “holy sh*t what am I even doing here” end. I personally only browsed some sites for weapons dealing and hitman hiring (which seemed somewhat fake, but you never know), but I’ve received numerous screenshots of leaked documents detailing human experiments on people as young as ten years old. Let me tell you, it’s some horrific stuff.

Born too early to explore the Earth, born too late to explore the Galaxy, born just in time to explore the Dark Web. But the question is, would you want to? I’d personally stay very far away.