This April, we are all reminded of the fragility as well as the interdependence of everything on our planet; and we certainly hope humanity can get out of the current crisis re-setting itself to bring into being a system that is more resilient, responsible, and incorporates more long-term thinking.
Those of us who like scientific and artistic thoughts to collide and mingle are reminded of the pale blue dot (that tiny dot in the middle image of the top row in the image) is the NASA spacecraft Voyager 1‘s view of Earth seen from the outer edge of the Solar System, an iconic though grainy image of Earth. The image was taken in 1990, as the spacecraft completed its exploratory mission (first launched into space in 1977); and as it took the last photograph - of Neptune - NASA commanded that the cameras be shut off to conserve energy. It was Carl Sagan, then part of the Voyager imaging team, who had the idea of turning the spacecraft around and taking one final photograph - of Earth. And so, on Valentine’s Day of 1990, this grainy pixel image of the Earth taken from 4 billion miles away and taking each pixel 5.5 hours to travel at the speed of light to reach us, was created.
The Family Portrait: These six narrow-angle color images were made from the first ever ‘portrait’ of the Solar System taken by Voyager 1 at 3.7 billion miles from Earth and about 32 degrees above the ecliptic. The spacecraft acquired a total of 60 frames for a mosaic of the solar system which shows six of the planets. Mercury is too close to the sun to be seen. Mars was not detectable by the Voyager cameras due to scattered sunlight in the optics, and Pluto was not included in the mosaic because of its small size and distance from the sun. These blown-up images, left to right and top to bottom are Venus, Earth, Jupiter, and Saturn, Uranus, Neptune. Image: NASA / JPL.
No space travels or any type of travels this April though!
Right now, we can only do armchair travels (in our self-isolation heaven and hell)! As we at 1+1 have the mission of bringing the sciences and the arts together, we thought to share with you six of our obsessions that are about voyages of the science-and-arts kind:
1. Galileo (who was the first to see mountains on the moon as well as the rings of Saturn and the ribbon of diffuse light arching across our skies - the Milky Way - among others) in Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems:
“To our natural and human reason, I say that these terms 'large', 'small', 'immense', 'minute', etc., are not absolute but relative; the same thing in comparison with various others may be called at one time 'immense' and at another 'imperceptible'."
2. Carl Sagan, on seeing that “pale blue dot”, wrote (included below is also a lovely animated graphics and audio adaptation of the text):
"Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."
And it was Sagan who also wrote this about the scientific doubt which is so relevant and pertinent to the world we live in today:
"Science demands a tolerance for ambiguity. Where we are ignorant, we withhold belief. Whatever annoyance the uncertainty engenders serves a higher purpose. It drives us to accumulate better data.”
3. John Muir, adventurer and often considered the first modern environmentalist, who inspired the national parks movement:
“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”
4. Norwegian explorer Erling Kagge, the first man to walk to both poles and climb Everest:
“To move slowly from one place to another has become a privilege. ...
The thing is, the world remains unexplored because the world is changing all the time but also because there’s always a new way to see everything.
... To walk—to take one step at a time—is about seeing yourself, loving the earth, and allowing your body to travel at the same speed as your soul. If you move too quickly you can't keep up with yourself.”
5. Architect Mies van der Rohe:
"Less is more."
6. The music of the gravitational waves
Really, do listen to the poetry of gravitational waves, captured in the landmark first detection in September 2015 - after centuries of knowing the universe only by sight, only by looking, we can now listen to it and hear echoes of events that took place billions of light-years away, billions of years ago - events that made the stardust that made us.
In fact, you can turn your phone into a "gravitational wave machine" with ringtones made from gravitational wave "sounds."
The "chirp" tones of the first two LIGO detections are available for download. (click here for installation instructions). Credit: LIGO.
- September 2015 Detection: m4r file (for iPhone) | mp3 file (for Android)
- December 2015 Detection: m4r file (for iPhone) | mp3 file (for Android)
LIGO's website has some brilliant resources on gravitational waves, here.