Cosmic Stuff...

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I feel like the beach is a perfect setting to think about cosmic stuff. Perhaps in part because I've been reading Neil deGrasse Tyson's "Astrophysics for People in a Hurry" but also because I'm taking a vacation where fields of sand stretch into a seemingly endless and watery abyss...

Generally, I'm not very good at taking vacations. I don't tan well, but I do enjoy sitting back with a drink and watching the tides get yanked around. Surrounded by billions of individual sand particles I'm reminded of a quote by astronomer Carl Sagan..."Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark." I mean, what better place to appreciate that quote than the beach? (Yikes, this guy is a real upper.)

When I was younger I used to troll the shoreline looking for treasure. (I still do.) There was/is always a hope of finding sea glass, rare shells, shark teeth or an ancient message in a bottle. In "Astrophysics for People in a Hurry" Tyson speaks to the incredible hope and excitement surrounding the Voyager 1 space mission back in 1977. Voyager was basically Earth's first interstellar message in a bottle. In this post, I'll highlight a bit about the Voyager mission and the message it continues to shepherd through billions of miles of stardust.

12 Billion Miles and Counting...

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In 1977 NASA launched the-now-cosmically-infamous “Voyager 1” space probe. The exploratory craft was designed to record and explore the outer depths of our solar system. For nearly 40 years Voyager 1 has whizzed past moons, planets and asteroid belts... A few years ago, Voyager 1 passed beyond our solar system and out into the great unknown of interstellar space, making it the most distant manmade object in our history.

12 billion miles and counting, Voyager 1 is still cruising...

Earth's Greatest Hits - The "Golden Record"

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Voyager 1 is also a kind of interplanetary message in a bottle / time-capsule / Rosetta Stone. Hidden aboard, Voyager carries a Golden Record that contains samples of musics, sounds and greetings recorded from all over the world. So if, by chance, an interstellar traveller (alien or otherwise) were to come upon said-record they can listen to the sounds of Earthling rain, wind, thunder, birds chirping, a chimpanzee, a mother and baby, a train, car, morse code, or even... "Johnny B. Goode" by Chuck Berry.

In creating this record, scientists compiled a wide range of material designed to be a crash-course on humanity. Listen to the whole album and you've got a good sense of what's going on 12 billion miles back down the space highway. Call it, Earth For Dummies.

Listen to the record here, via NASA's website.

A Solar System Flyby

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Voyager passed by a handful of planets en route to interstellar space. Along the way, it snapped some incredible images. Here are just a few (below) and you can find more on NASA's website, here.

Jupiter time lapse, above.

Saturn zoom of rings and surrounding moons, above.

The probe’s initial mission included flybys of Jupiter, Saturn and Titan (Saturn’s largest moon.) In 1980, Voyager 1 passed Saturn and entered the outer heliosphere. (A region that encompasses our solar system and bordered by solar wind.) On February 14, 1990, the spacecraft turned its lens back towards us and took a photograph that became known as “The Pale Blue Dot”... The photograph (below) was not a planned part of Voyager’s mission, but an impromptu move that was made at the request of Carl Sagan, leader of the Voyager Imaging team.

A few years later, Sagan made an incredibly moving statement about this one-of-a-kind image taken 3.7 billion miles away from home. (An excerpt of a commencement address delivered May 11, 1996.)

“We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every 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."

"Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It’s been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.” - Carl Sagan (1996)

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