Showing posts with label Carl Sagan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Carl Sagan. Show all posts
...
I don't understand how astronomers are able to give a fuck about anything in their daily lives. If I had to think about stuff like this all day I'd start drinking as soon as I got in my car to go home and quickly end up in prison. I almost dropped out of school once because I couldn't stop thinking about how the sun was eventually going to consume the earth and how everything was pointless. Then I got over it.
When trying to conceive of the utter abyss of space I think everyone is either drawn towards the Lovecraft view of it and despair at our insignificance or the Sagan view of it and get excited about our uniqueness. Shut up Liam.
Happy Ash Wednesday!
Memento homo, quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris.
(Remember, O man, that you are dust, and unto dust you shall return.)
I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that some thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue. But much as I want to believe that, and despite the ancient and worldwide cultural traditions that assert an afterlife, I know of nothing to suggest that it is more than wishful thinking . . . The world is so exquisite with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there's little good evidence. Far better it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is to look death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides.—Carl Sagan
Here Mr. Billions-and-Billions describes how it's a little bit more than dust from whence we came (skip to 2:30 if you're in a hurry):
My New Favorite Things of the Past 2 Weeks
Joe Cocker - Space Captain
Grant Phabao & Djouls - Are Molesting Laura Vol.9 mixtape of all brass band covers (especially the Hot 8 Brass Band's version of Sexual Healing)Scientists discover the fossil remains of what could be the largest snake to ever exist. A relative of today’s boa constrictor, it was at least 12.8 meters long and weighed more than a ton. Another scientist has found what he believes to be the world's smallest snake.
Crazy pictures of the sun and the Smithsonian's top NASA photos of all time.
The awesomely unauthorized video of Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot.
My new pop-up book that I discovered through BoingBoing (and is only $14 on Amazon!):
The Wunderkammer exhibit that is up at MoMA right now (and is closing on November 10th).
John Hodgman describing his encounters with aliens:
The Chris Ware cartoon that the New Yorker wouldn't publish because it broke with their formatting:
And this, my new favorite song that I can't believe I've never heard before:
Ray Charles - Let's Go Get Stoned
[right-click to download]
Kaufee and Eggs
Unless you're one of those unfortunate people who doesn't work in an office with a vast amount of free time every day, I'm just going to go ahead and assume you've already listened to all 18 episodes of the Kaufee and Eggs show. So posting their new animation by Joe Boyle is completely redundant, right?
A Visit to the Natty Hist. Museum
Liam Lynch's (aka one half of Sifl & Olly) Museum Rap
I really hope The X-Wing dance move catches on...
When I first moved to the city I spent 1 week deciding what my dream job would be (diorama builder at the Natural History museum), 1 week drafting a letter and 2 weeks waiting for them to call and offer me a job. After a month I figured out I should probably be looking for other work at the same time. I can't believe I was that stupid. I still love dioramas though, my friend Jeremy and I had this great idea to start making shoebox dioramas to send to each other in the mail. It never happened, probably because it would have required quitting our jobs and all other extra-curricular activities in order to get them done.
This is a metal album cover waiting to (please guys) happen:
I had an epiphany that owls are pretty much flying cats:
These types of mineral formations make me think about what an alien manufactured object would begin to look like, something completely divorced from the entire human history of creation yet recognizably designed. Actually it reminds me of the ancient alien tomb that surfaces a few hundred miles off New Zealand in HP Lovecraft's The Call of Cthulu. Some sailors come upon it and are sickened by "the geometry of the dream-place...abnormal, non-Euclidean, and loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from ours." This feeling, and Lovecraft's general deal (as far as I've read of him), is summed up in the opening paragraph of the same story thusly:
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of disassociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."The guy is pretty much the anti-Sagan (and predictor of Reavers).
Peking
Alexandria
I forget which city this is (note the flying carpet hovering above the city). The shifting scale and perspective on these things is really impressive.
Either We're Alone in the Universe Or Not...
The Voyager Golden Record
Sounds and Images
30 years ago, taking advantage of the favorable alignment of the planets in the late 70s, NASA launched two probes, Voyager 1 and 2, with the goal of studying Jupiter and Saturn. (I'd take time to talk about how amazing the Pale Blue Dot is but I would go on forever.) Once they completed studying Jupiter and Saturn (of which little had previously been known) they continued in different directions and are now on the fringes of our solar system, where the Sun's influence gives way to other galactic bodies. To give you a sense of how far that is, Voyager 2 is now twice as far from the Sun as Pluto and its signals take 14 hours to reach Earth. As of last year, the two spacecraft became the third and fourth human artifacts to escape entirely from the solar system (preceded by Pioneers 10 and 11, which were launched in 1972 and 1973).
Mindful of this mind-boggling fact, the astronomers Carl Sagan and Frank Drake somehow convinced NASA to bolt a gold-plated copper phonograph record to the outer hull of Voyager containing information chosen by a committee chaired by Sagan. This information was etched into gold and is expected to last a billion years, which, as the producer of the record points out in a very Sagan-ian way, is as far in the future as life on earth emerging from the seas was in the past.
If alien cultures or future human civilizations were to intercept the satellite (which is all but impossible, the symbolism of reaching out being the more important aspect here) and were able to figure out how to use the attached record player cartridge they would be greeted by an encoded analog signal that once calibrated would render a series of 115 images (think of a fax machine) followed by greetings in 55 languages, nature sounds, and 90 minutes of music from all over the world as well as printed messages from UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim and this one from President Carter:
"We cast this message into the cosmos ... Of the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, some—perhaps many—may have inhabited planets and space faring civilizations. If one such civilization intercepts Voyager and can understand these recorded contents, here is our message: We are trying to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope some day, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of Galactic Civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination and our goodwill in a vast and awesome universe ... This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours."(One of my favorite things about this record is that they mix in whale songs and bird calls as if they're just one more greeting in another language!)
Overlooking the burst of radio and television signals that are now forever radiating outwards from earth, the idea that these images and sounds may conceivably become the only surviving remnants of our existence makes me giddy with delight and a little choked up. Just listen to Blind Willie Johnson play Dark Was the Night and think of it hurtling through a cold empty darkness you can't even begin to imagine. If I ever cried, I would cry now.
Perhaps one of the most accurate things the project revealed about humanity (or at least Americans) was that when the public got wind that the illustration on the disc included drawings of a nude woman and man, newspapers began receiving angry letters accusing NASA of wasting taxpayer money to send "obscenities" into space. On a further bitter note (and to provide one more reason to get rid of record labels forever), Sagan and the Beatles both wanted to include the song Here Comes the Sun but the Beatles label EMI wouldn't allow it. Seriously, what the fuck? On a side note of a side note, in 2002 the British band Blur (also on EMI) composed a song to be beamed back from the surface of Mars by the Beagle 2 (a British landing spacecraft that was part of the European Space Agency's 2003 Mars Express mission) to signal its safe arrival. Sadly the craft was either lost in transit or malfunctioned on the surface and was never heard from.
So here's the game (more of the photos can be found here): As an alien (and assuming that you can process audio and visual signals in the same frequencies as humans-however unlikely), look at some of the images from the record and extrapolate the existence of the human species, and their location, ecosystem, biology, genetics, reproduction, cultures, societies, mathematics etc. from the following selection of images from those record contains. I can't stop laughing! And keep in mind, these will probably become the only surviving documents of the human race:
In case you didn't notice, one of the first photos of Earth are of Egypt, the Nile and the Red Sea, as if they'd possibly recognize it! (Or would they?)
The infection takes hold!
People become transparent as a parasite develops?
Dolphins fly.
A doctor treating a sick human?
A small human riding an enslaved larger human? Answer: Obviously, since it clearly also has four appendages and a face, therefore human.
Humans first attempt at reaching space.
Humans ambulate by becoming transparent and then tumbling forward.
Earthings eventually grew to be larger than their planet and had to leave:
Fish float in the air or (and this is more likely) there is a separate underwater race of humans...
...that can't touch solid ground and try to catch land-based humans using nets...
...Which is why the land-based humans must erect watchtowers along the waterline:
I prefer to imagine that my tax dollars are only going towards the federal government hiring actors to demonstrate licking, eating and drinking:
This is my favorite picture of the group (it reminds me of my friend Jeremy in 2057) and if they can't understand why it's great than I didn't really want to meet them anyway:
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