"Megalophobia"

It's a new word to me as well, new in the last few weeks.  It means "fear of large things."  Instagram illustrates the concept beautifully with a short clip of an Airbus A380 -- the largest commercial airliner now in service -- emerging out of a dense fog for a near-zero-visibility landing directly over the videographer's head.  It does indeed inspire a frisson of fear.

What historical examples can we conjure up?

• JFK and his crewmates at the moment when they realized that a Japanese destroyer was about to cut Patrol Torpedo Boat No. 109 in half.
• The denizens of Fukushima, Japan and of Banda Aceh, Indonesia, when the entire sea rose to take their towns away.
• German soldiers manning a pillbox overlooking Omaha Beach at dawn on June 6, 1944, when they first looked, with disbelief, at the scale of the armada that had been organized for their destruction.

But a prospect of imminent death is not necessary to this our new equation; it is immensity per se that instills this instinctive fear.  Thus, if we could be transported via spaceship to a spot within, say, 1000 miles of the surface of the sun, with no danger whatsoever in our secure little capsule, we would nonetheless be overcome with megalophobia without doubt.

And sometimes megalophobia can bleed into something that we might call ... what?... "nanophobia"?  That is to say, "fear of very tiny things."  A global-scale attack on our bodies by little viral squiggles might be an example, leaving us in fear of both big and small, and forced to seek shelter in media res.

My current dread of Something Big bears closest resemblance, I think, to that of the pillbox Germans, except that for me it is not the morning of June 6, but the afternoon of June 5.  The killer armada is not in sight, but its immanence can be felt in the bones.