ALE BLUE DOT" (white pixel above) the last "Family Portrait" [ click photo for next . . . ] photograph of Earth made by VOYAGER I

"PALE BLUE DOT" (white pixel above) the last "Family Portrait" [ click photo for next . . . ]
photograph of Earth made by VOYAGER I,
made in 1990 at a distance of 6 billion kilometers
from Earth, made at the request of Carl Sagan.

Below is a remarkable passage in the remarkable late
poet-scientist Carl Sagan's book, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision
of the Human Future in Space:

"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."


On the road in the American Northwest.





"The spacecraft will be encountered and the record played
only if there are advanced space-faring civilizations
in interstellar space. But the launching of this 'bottle'
into the cosmic 'ocean' says something very hopeful
about life on this planet."

CARL SAGAN


LISTENING: #German via @drs2
An den Grenzen des Sonnensystems
http://bit.ly/QzQXUo
Story of the Voyager spacecrafts,
from the Switzerland
VOYAGER'S great GOLDEN RECORD, "Who speaks for Earth?"


SENSE OF WONDER, OR THE UNITY
OF SCIENCE & SPIRITUALITY

When science opens an hitherto unseen door,
encountering thresholds it cannot yet cross, we have the
beginnings of spirituality; When spirituality manifests
in new number, ratio, or universal theory, we have the
beginnings of science at its best, as a journey of discovery.
Science and spirituality, just like the relationship between
known and unknown, or tradition and creativity, are always
two sides of one movement. The line we draw between
them is like the line of a distant horizon, forever
receding as we come near. Metaphor is then the
scientist's rhyming of meaning, in both number and word;
it is this sense of wonder that becomes the songline that
guides us deeper and deeper into this uncharted,
essentially pathless, land.

THE LITTLE CLAVIER please preview 150 of 631 pages
w/ my black & white photography [opens in new window]













Featured gallery, 100 MINIATURES, a set of 100 black & white photographs. ONE image. ONE idea. ONE new way of looking . . .
100 MINIATURES—online gallery

Each miniature is a kind of meditation on one idea & one image;
Each lasts 30 seconds; They play in random order;
The music is my BOREA Mix,
for hand-played ePecussion Orchestra.
[ mouse over for controls / lower right fro full-screen ]




All Photographs & texts by Cliff Crego © 1999-2015 picture-poems.com
(created: III.22.2012)