Voyager Space Quotes

Modern science has been a voyage into the unknown, with a lesson in humility waiting at every stop. Many passengers would rather have stayed home.

Ah, youth! It was a beautiful night... The moon was out of orbit. The stars were awry. But everything else was exactly as it should have been.

There are books, that one has for twenty years without reading them, that one always keeps at hand, that one takes along from city to city, from country to country, carefully packed, even when there is very little room, and perhaps one leafs through them while removing them from a trunk; yet one carefully refrains from reading even a complete sentence. Then after twenty years, there comes a moment when suddenly, as though under a high compulsion, one cannot help taking in such a book from beginning to end, at one sitting: it is like a revelation. Now one knows why one made such a fuss about it. It had to be with one for a long time; it had to travel; it had to occupy space; it had to be a burden; and now it has reached the goal of its voyage, now it reveals itself, now it illuminates the twenty bygone years it mutely lived with one. It could not say so much if it had not been there mutely the whole time, and what idiot would dare to assert that the same things had always been in it.

The symbolism seemed so apt. The same technology that can propel apocalyptic weapons from continent to continent would enable the first human voyage to another planet. It was a choice of fitting mythic power: to embrace the planet named after, rather than the madness ascribed to, the god of war.

Writing, like life itself, is a voyage of discovery. The adventure is a metaphysical one: it is a way of approaching life indirectly, of acquiring a total rather than a partial view of the universe. The writer lives between the upper and lower worlds: he takes the path in order eventually to become that path himself. ”I began in absolute chaos and darkness, in a bog or swamp of ideas and emotions and experiences. Even now I do not consider myself a writer, in the ordinary sense of the word. I am a man telling the story of his life, a process which appears more and more inexhaustible as I go on. Like the world-evolution, it is endless. It is a turning inside out, a voyaging through X dimensions, with the result that somewhere along the way one discovers that what one has to tell is not nearly so important as the telling itself. It is this quality about all art which gives it a metaphysical hue, which lifts it out of time and space and centers or integrates it to the whole cosmic process. It is this about art which is ‘therapeutic’: significance, purposefulness, infinitude. ”From the very beginning almost I was deeply aware that there is no goal. I never hope to embrace the whole, but merely to give in each separate fragment, each work, the feeling of the whole as I go on, because I am digging deeper and deeper into life, digging deeper and deeper into past and future. With the endless burrowing a certitude develops which is greater than faith or belief. I become more and more indifferent to my fate, as writer, and more and more certain of my destiny as a man.

I love you sons of bitches. You’re all I read any more. You're the only ones who’ll talk all about the really terrific changes going on, the only ones crazy enough to know that life is a space voyage, and not a short one, either, but one that’ll last for billions of years. You’re the only ones with guts enough to really care about the future, who really notice what machines do to us, what wars do to us, what cities do to us, what big, simple ideas do to us, what tremendous misunderstanding, mistakes, accidents, catastrophes do to us. You're the only ones zany enough to agonize over time and distance without limit, over mysteries that will never die, over the fact that we are right now determining whether the space voyage for the next billion years or so is going to be Heaven or Hell.

Billions of years from now our sun, then a distended red giant star, will have reduced Earth to a charred cinder. But the Voyager record will still be largely intact, in some other remote region of the Milky Way galaxy, preserving a murmur of an ancient civilization that once flourished — perhaps before moving on to greater deeds and other worlds — on the distant planet Earth.

Gliding o’er all, through all,Through Nature, Time, and Space, As a ship on the waters advancing, The voyage of the soul—not life alone, Death, many deaths I’ll sing.

James Alexander Malcolm MacKenzie Fraser," I said, spacing the words, formally, the way Jamie had spoken them to me when he first told me his full name on the day of our wedding.

We tend to hear much more about the splendors returned than the ships that brought them or the shipwrights. It has always been that way. Even those history books enamored of the voyages of Christopher Columbus do not tell much about the builders of the Nina the Pinta and the Santa Maria or about the principle of the caravel. These spacecraft their designers builders navigators and controllers are examples of what science and engineering set free for well-defined peaceful purposes can accomplish. Those scientists and engineers should be role models for an America seeking excellence and international competitiveness. They should be on our stamps.

When I was small, I never wanted to step in puddles. Not because of any fear of drowned worms or wet stockings; I was by and large a grubby child, with a blissful disregard for filth of any kind. It was because I couldn't bring myself believe that that perfect smooth expanse was no more than I thin film of water over solid earth. I believed it was an opening into some fathomless space. Sometimes, seeing the tiny ripples caused by my approach, I thought the puddle impossibly deep, a bottomless sea in which the lazy coil of a tentacle and gleam of scale lay hidden, with the threat of huge bodies and sharp teeth adrift and silent in the far-down depths. And then, looking down into reflection, I would see my own round face and frizzled hair against a featureless blue sweep, and think instead that the puddle was the entrance to another sky. If I stepped in there, I would drop at once, and keep on falling, on and on, into blue space. The only time I would dare walk though a puddle was at twilight, when the evening stars came out. If I looked in the water and saw one lighted pinprick there, I could slash through unafraid--for if I should fall into the puddle and on into space, I could grab hold of the star as I passed, and be safe. Even now, when I see a puddle in my path, my mind half-halts--though my feet do not--then hurries on, with only the echo of the though left behind. What if, this time, you fall?

This Voyager spacecraft was constructed by the United States of America. We are a community of 240 million human beings among the more than 4 billion who inhabit the planet Earth. We human beings are still divided into nation states, but these states are rapidly becoming a single global civilization. We cast this message into the cosmos. It is likely to survive a billion years into our future, when our civilization is profoundly altered and the surface of the Earth may be vastly changed. Of the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, some--perhaps many--may have inhabited planets and spacefaring civilizations. If one such civilization intercepts Voyager and can understand these recorded contents, here is our message: 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. We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination, and our good will in a vast and awesome universe

Nobody gives way to anybody. Everyone just angles, points, dives directly toward his destination, pretending it is an all-or-nothing gamble. People glare at one another and fight for maneuvering space. All parties are equally determined to get the right-of-way--insist on it. They swerve away at the last possible moment, giving scant inches to spare. The victor goes forwards, no time for a victory grin, already engaging in another contest of will. Saigon traffic is Vietnamese life, a continuous charade of posturing, bluffing, fast moves, tenacity and surrenders.

There are several other sources of enjoyment in a long voyage, which are of a more reasonable nature. The map of the world ceases to be a blank; it becomes a picture full of the most varied and animated figures. Each part assumes its proper dimensions: continents are not looked at in the light of islands, or islands considered as mere specks, which are, in truth, larger than many kingdoms of Europe. Africa, or North and South America, are well-sounding names, and easily pronounced; but it is not until having sailed for weeks along small portions of their shores, that one is thoroughly convinced what vast spaces on our immense world these names imply.

Perhaps the records will never be intercepted. Perhaps no one in five billion years will ever come upon them. Five billion years is a long time. In five billion years, all human beings will have become extinct or evolved into other beings, none of our artifacts will have survived on Earth, the continents will have become unrecognizably altered or destroyed, and the evolution of the Sun will have burned the Earth to a crisp or reduced it to a whirl of atoms. Far from home, untouched by these remote events, the Voyagers, bearing the memories of a world that is no more, will fly on.

our Earth is taking part in a fantastic cosmic ballet. First, it pulls us through space at a speed of nearly twenty miles per second during its annual journey around the Sun. The Sun then drags the Earth with it during its voyage through the Milky Way at a speed of 140 miles per second. The Milky Way is falling in turn at approximately fifty-five miles per second toward Andromeda. And there's more to come. The Local Group that contains our galaxy and Andromeda is falling at about 375 miles per second toward the Virgo cluster of galaxies, which is in turn moving toward a large complex of galaxies called the Great Attractor.

And in the space of a few short hours, life had been reduced from a highly complex existence, with a thousand petty problems, to one of the barest simplicity in which only one real task remained—the achievement of the goal.

The connection we feel to other people isn’t bound by geography or space,” Wells began. Although Clarke could see him trembling, his voice was strong and clear. “Sasha and I grew up in two different worlds, each of us wondering and dreaming about what was out there. I watched from above, never knowing for sure whether humans had survived here on Earth. I didn’t know if we’d ever set foot on this planet again or if it would happen in my lifetime. And she looked up”—he pointed at the fading stars, still faintly visible in the dark blue sky—“and wondered if there was anyone up there. Had anyone survived the voyage into space? Had people managed to stay alive up there all these hundreds of years? For both of us, getting answers to our questions seemed so unlikely. But a million tiny forces moved us toward each other, and we got our answers. We found each other, even if it was just for a moment.” Wells took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “Sasha was my answer.

Many people remember that when in 1977 the Voyager spacecraft was launched, opinions were canvassed as to what artefacts would be most appropriate to leave in outer space as a signal of man's cultural achievements on earth. The American astronomer Carl Sagan proposed that 'if we are to convey something of what humans are about then music has to be a part of it.' To Sagan's request for suggestions, the eminent biologist Lewis Thomas answered, 'I would send the complete works of Johann Sebastian Bach.' After a pause, he added, 'But that would be boasting.

Each Voyager is itself a message. In their exploratory intent, in the lofty ambition of their objectives, in their utter lack of intent to do harm, and in the brilliance of their design and performance, these robots speak eloquently for us.

It was long before they moved, and when they moved it was with great reluctance. They stood together in front of the looking-glass, and with a brush tried to make themselves look as if they had been feeling nothing all the morning, neither pain nor happiness. But it chilled them to see themselves in the glass, for instead of being vast and indivisible they were really very small and separate, the size of the glass leaving a large space for the reflection of other things.

He also said - pointedly - that space travel nowadays was an escape from the problems of Earth. That is, one took off for the stars in the hope that the worst would happen and be done with in one's absence. And indeed I couldn't deny that more than once I had peered anxiously out the porthole - especially when returning from a long voyage - to see whether or not our planet resembled a burnt potato.

Voyages to the outer solar system are controlled from a single place on the planet Earth, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in Pasadena, California.

Do you ever stop and wonder at all of this?' Kaity asked, gesturing around them while a robot rolled by. 'After what we’ve been through?' her husband said wryly. 'We are, after all, space travelers. We’ve voyaged light-years from Earth, to settle in lands both terrifying and fantastic. Little fazes us anymore...

I knew that the return trip is the real journey, when it floods the days that follow, so much so that it creates the prolonged sensation of one time getting lost in another, of one space losing itself in another.

All of us have monarchs and sages for kinsmen; nay, angels and archangels for cousins; since in antediluvian days, the sons of God did verily wed with our mothers, the irresistible daughters of Eve. Thus all generations are blended: and heaven and earth of one kin: the hierarchies of seraphs in the uttermost skies; the thrones and principalities in the zodiac; the shades that roam throughout space; the nations and families, flocks and folds of the earth; one and all, brothers in essence—oh, be we then brothers indeed! All things form but one whole.

Introducing uncertainty sometimes requires nothing more than letting go of the illusion of certitude. In this shift of perception, we recognize the inherent mystery of our partner. I point out to Adele that if we are to maintain desire with one person over time we must be able to bring a sense of unknown into a familiar space. In the words of Proust, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.

His mind, grooved through the uncounted ages to ultimate despair, soared up insanely. His legs and arms glistened like tongues of living fire as they writhed and twisted in the light that blazed from the portholes. His mouth, a gash in his caricature of a human head, slavered a white frost that floated away in little frozen globules.

That place, called the heliopause, is one definition of the outer boundary of the Empire of the Sun. But the Voyager spacecraft will plunge on, penetrating the heliopause sometime in the middle of the twenty-first century, skimming through the ocean of space, never to enter another solar system, destined to wander through eternity far from the stellar islands and to complete its first circumnavigation of the massive center of the Milky Way a few hundred million years from now. We have embarked on epic voyages.

(Poetry) helped me to find a silver lining in even the darkest emotions, experiences, observations and topics; find positivity even in the face of extreme negativity; find strength when I was being forced to feel weak; and find hope that my tomorrows would be brighter.

From the vantage point of my warm, comfortable spot on mother earth, I could see off into infinite space and the eternity of time. In just a few hours, I thought, some of us are going to make that leap into eternity. And I will be one of the instruments of that voyage. I may also be one of the travelers....It's going to happen sooner or later. But if today is my day-I'm going to have a cup of coffee first.

merchants who financed this expedition viewed it as a reconnaissance mission rather than a trading venture and little cargo was loaded on board the ships. Instead, all available space was converted into living space for the large number of men on board, a necessary feature of long voyages into the unknown. Many would die on the outward trip and for those that survived there was a cornucopia of tropical diseases awaiting them on their arrival in the East

You assume far too readily that man is a paragon of justice, forgetting, apparently, that he has a long and savage history. He has killed other animals not only for meat but for pleasure; he has enslaved his neighbors, murdered his opponents, and obtained the most unholy sadistical joy from the agony of others. It is not impossible that we shall, in the course of our travels, meet other intelligent creatures far more worthy than man to rule the universe.

Have you ever heard of the madman who on a bright morning lighted a lantern and ran to the market-place calling out unceasingly: "I seek God! I seek God!"—As there were many people standing about who did not believe in God, he caused a great deal of amusement. Why! is he lost? said one. Has he strayed away like a child? said another. Or does he keep himself hidden? Is he afraid of us? Has he taken a sea-voyage? Has he emigrated?—the people cried out laughingly, all in a hubbub. The insane man jumped into their midst and transfixed them with his glances. "Where is God gone?" he called out. "I mean to tell you! We have killed him,—you and I! We are all his murderers! But how have we done it? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the whole horizon? What did we do when we loosened this earth from its sun? Whither does it now move? Whither do we move? Away from all suns? Do we not dash on unceasingly? Back-wards, sideways, forewards, in all directions? Is there still an above and below? Do we not stray, as through infinite nothingness? Does not empty space breathe upon us? Has it not become colder? Does not night come on continually, darker and darker? Shall we not have to light lanterns in the morning? Do we not hear the noise of the grave-diggers who are burying God? Do we not smell the divine putrefaction?—for even Gods putrefy! God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him! How shall we console ourselves, the most murderous of all murderers? The holiest and the mightiest that the world has hitherto possessed, has bled to death under our knife,—who will wipe the blood from us? With what water could we cleanse ourselves? What lustrums, what sacred games shall we have to devise? Is not the magnitude of this deed too great for us? Shall we not ourselves have to become Gods, merely to seem worthy of it? There never was a greater event,—and on account of it, all who are born after us belong to a higher history than any history hitherto!"—Here the madman was silent and looked again at his hearers; they also were silent and looked at him in surprise. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, so that it broke in pieces and was extinguished. "I come too early," he then said, "I am not yet at the right time. This prodigious event is still on its way, and is travelling,—it has not yet reached men's ears. Lightning and thunder need time, the light of the stars needs time, deeds need time, even after they are done, to be seen and heard. This deed is as yet further from them than the furthest star,—and yet they have done it!"—It is further stated that the madman made his way into different churches on the same day, and there intoned his Requiem æternam deo. When led out and called to account, he always gave the reply: "What are these churches now, if they are not the tombs and monuments of God?

I remember reading that the space shuttle uses more fuel during its first three minutes after liftoff than during its entire voyage around the earth,

THE VOYAGE OF THE SPACE BEAGLE

Modern science has been a voyage into the unknown, with a lesson in humility waiting at every stop.

Don’t you understand anything? Isn’t it absolutely essential to keep a fierce Left and a fierce Right both on their toes and each terrified of the other? That’s how we get things done.

These temporary apprehensions, so vague but so awful, derived a wondrous potency from the contrasting serenity of the weather, in which, beneath all its blue blandness, some thought there lurked a devilish charm, as for days and days we voyaged along, through seas so wearily, lonesomely mild, that all space, in repugnance to our vengeful errand, seemed vacating itself of life before our urn-like prow.

Choked by the wind their spirits rose with a rush, for on the skirts of all the grey tumult was a misty spot of gold. Instantly the world dropped into shape; they were no longer atoms flying in the void, but people riding a triumphant ship on the back of the sea. Wind and space were banished; the world floated like an apple in a tub, and the mind of man, which had been unmoored also, once more attached itself to the old beliefs.

The beauty of the imagination is that it can discover such magnificent vastness inside a tiny space. Our culture is dominated by quantity. Even those who have plenty hunger for more and more. Everywhere around us, the reign of quantity extends and multiplies. Sadly the voyage of greed has all the urgency but no sense of destination. Desire becomes inflated and loses all sense of vision and proportion. When beauty becomes an acquisition it brings no delight.

For one day as I leant over a gate that led into a field, the rhythm stopped: the rhymes and the hummings, the nonsense and the poetry. A space was cleared in my mind. I saw through the thick leaves of habit. Leaning over the gate I regretted so much litter, so much unaccomplishment and separation, for one cannot cross London to see a friend, life being so full of engagements; nor take a ship to India and see a naked man spearing a fish in blue water. I said life had been imperfect, an unfinished phrase. It had been impossible for me, taking snuff as I do from any bagman met in a train, to keep coherency—that sense of the generations, of women carrying red pitchers to the Nile, of the nightingale who sings among conquests and migrations. It had been too vast an undertaking, I said, and how can I go on lifting my foot perpetually to climb the stair? I addressed myself as one would speak to a companion with whom one is voyaging to the North Pole.

He lifted the telephone receiver and pressed it against the plastic of his helmet. If there had been a dialing sound he could have heard it through the conducting material. But, as he had expected, there was only silence. So—it was all a fake, though a fantastically careful one. And it was clearly not intended to deceive but rather—he hoped—to reassure. That was a very comforting thought; nevertheless he would not remove his suit until he had completed his voyage of exploration.

One recalls the literary writer who, after grasping a story of a Mars voyage as a metaphor for isolation and the precariousness of relationships, realized that at a deeper, more subtle level it might even be a story about an actual trip to Mars!

The Mars settlement may not grow that quickly, although the length of a sea voyage cross the Atlantic in the 1600's is comparable to the time it will take people to get to Mars on a spacecraft, and the cost, in relative terms, is not that different.

What was the organization of illusion, of memory? Who knew even his own divided heart? Who knew all hearts as his own? Among beings strange to each other, those divided by the long roarings of time, of space, those who have never met or, when they meet, have not recognized as their own the other heart and that heart's weaknesses, have turned stonily away, would there not be, in the vision of some omniscient eye, a web of spidery logic establishing the most secret relationships, deep calling to deep, illuminations of the eternal darkness, recognitions in the night world of voyager dreams, all barriers dissolving, all souls as one and united? Every heart is the other heart. Every soul is the other soul. Every face is the other face. The individual is the one illusion.

U.S. launch vehicles are these days too feeble to get such a spacecraft to Jupiter and beyond in only a few years by rocket propulsion alone. But if we’re clever (and lucky), there’s something else we can do: We can (as Galileo also did, years later) fly close to one world, and have its gravity fling us on to the next. A gravity assist, it’s called. It costs us almost nothing but ingenuity. It’s something like grabbing hold of a post on a moving merry-go-round as it passes—to speed you up and fling you in some new direction. The spacecraft’s acceleration is compensated for by a deceleration in the planet’s orbital motion around the Sun. But because the planet is so massive compared to the spacecraft, it slows down hardly at all. Each Voyager spacecraft picked up a velocity boost of nearly 40,000 miles per hour from Jupiter’s gravity. Jupiter in turn was slowed down in its motion around the Sun. By how much? Five billion years from now, when our Sun becomes a swollen red giant, Jupiter will be one millimeter short of where it would have been had Voyager not flown by it in the late twentieth century.

But filled with one of those unreasonable exultations which start generally from an unknown cause, and sweep whole countries and skies into their embrace, she walked without seeing. The night was encroaching upon the day. Her ears hummed with the tunes she had played the night before; she sang, and the singing made her walk faster and faster. She did not see distinctly where she was going, the trees and the landscape appearing only as masses of green and blue, with an occasional space of differently coloured sky. Faces of people she had seen last night came before her; she heard their voices; she stopped singing, and began saying things over again or saying things differently, or inventing things that might have been said. The constraint of being among strangers in a long silk dress made it unusually exciting to stride thus alone.

While spinning daily on its own axis, the earth also orbits the sun (again in an anti-clockwise direction) on a path which is slightly elliptical rather than completely circular. It pursues this orbit at truly breakneck speed, travelling as far along it in an hour – 66,600 miles – as the average motorist will drive in six years. To bring the calculations down in scale, this means that we are hurtling through space much faster than any bullet, at the rate of 18.5 miles every second. In the time that it has taken you to read this paragraph, we have voyaged about 550 miles farther along earth’s path around the sun.3

It is conventional wisdom now that anything built by the government will be a disaster. But the two "Voyager" spacecraft were built by the government (in partnership with that other bugaboo, academia). They came in at cost, on time, and vastly exceeded their design specifications--as well as the fondest dreams of their makers. Seeking not to control, threaten, wound, or destroy, these elegant machines represented the exploratory part of our nature set free to roam the Solar System and beyond. This kind of technology, the treasures it uncovers freely available to all humans everywhere, has been, over the last few decades, one of the few activities of the United States admired as much by those who abhor many of its policies as by those who agree with it on every issue. "Voyager" cost each American less than a penny a year from launch to Neptune encounter. Missions to the planets are one of those things--and I mean this not just for the United States, but for the human species--that we do best.

He made the mistake of booking first-class passage on the maiden voyage of the Titanic. When that liner struck an iceberg, the crew asked him, because of his sailing expertise, to row a lifeboat full of passengers to safety. He was an honorable man—the president of the Standard Chemical Company and a major in the Queen’s Own Rifles—and he was doing a heroic deed.

It is sometimes said that 'light is a form of wave-motion', but this is misleading, for the light which we immediately see, which we know directly by means of our senses, is not a form of wave-motion, but something quite different—something which we all know if we are not blind, though we cannot describe it so as to convey our knowledge to a man who is blind. A wave-motion, on the contrary, could quite well be described to a blind man, since he can acquire a knowledge of space by the sense of touch; and he can experience a wave-motion by a sea voyage almost as well as we can. But this, which a blind man can understand, is not what we mean by light: we mean by light just that which a blind man can never understand, and which we can never describe to him.

In the moment all is dear to me, dear that in this logic there is no redemption, the city itself being the highest form of madness and each and every part, organic or inorganic, an expression of this same madness. I feel absurdly and humbly great, not as megalomaniac, but as human spore, as the dead sponge of life swollen to saturation. I no longer look into the eyes of the woman I hold in my arms but I swim through, head and arms and legs, and I see that behind the sockets of the eyes there is a region unexplored, the world of futurity, and here there is no logic whatever, just the still germination of events unbroken by night and day, by yesterday and tomorrow. The eye, accustomed to concentration on points in space, now concentrates on points in time; the eye sees forward and backward at will. The eye which was the I of the self no longer exists; this selfless eye neither reveals nor illuminates. It travels along the line of the horizon, a ceaseless, uninformed voyager. Trying to retain the lost body I grew in logic as the city, a point digit in the anatomy of perfection. I grew beyond my own death, spiritually bright and hard. I was divided into endless yesterdays, endless tomorrows, resting only on the cusp of the event, a wall with many windows, but the house gone. I must shatter the walls and windows, the last shell of the lost body, if I am to rejoin the present. That is why I no longer look into the eyes or through the eyes, but by the legerdemain of will swim through the eyes, head and arms and legs to explore the curve of vision. I see around myself as the mother who bore me once saw round the comers of time. I have broken the wall created by birth and the line of voyage is round and unbroken, even as the navel. No form, no image, no architecture, only concentric flights of sheer madness. I am the arrow of the dream's substantiality. I verify by flight. I nullify by dropping to earth.

Make Believe When I wake up in the morning Not all is what it seems I drift through a world of make believe Between my real life and my dreams. Strange Adventures from the space book That I read the night before Crowd in upon on my drowsiness Through imagination's door. Between sleeping and waking The alarm clock's jangalang cry Becomes the roaring fire-railed rocket That hurls me through the sky. My bed's a silver spacecraft Which I pilot all alone Whisp'ring through endless stratospheres Towards planets still unknown. Outside through the mists of morning The spinning lights of cars In my make-believe space voyage Become eternities of stars. Is that my mother calling something That my dreams can't understand? Or can it be crackling instructions From far off Mission Command? Gareth Owen

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. We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination, and our good will in a vast and awesome universe.

I love you sons of bitches,” Eliot said in Milford. “You’re all I read any more. You’re the only ones who’ll talk about the really terrific changes going on, the only ones crazy enough to know that life is a space voyage, and not a short one, either, but one that’ll last for billions of years. You’re the only ones with guts enough to really care about the future, who really notice what machines do to us, what wars do to us, what cities do to us, what big, simple ideas do to us, what tremendous misunderstandings, mistakes, accidents and catastrophes do to us. You’re the only ones zany enough to agonize over time and distances without limit, over mysteries that will never die, over the fact that we are right now determining whether the space voyage for the next billion years or so is going to be Heaven or Hell.

The Mercy The ship that took my mother to Ellis Island eighty-three years ago was named "The Mercy." She remembers trying to eat a banana without first peeling it and seeing her first orange in the hands of a young Scot, a seaman who gave her a bite and wiped her mouth for her with a red bandana and taught her the word, "orange," saying it patiently over and over. A long autumn voyage, the days darkening with the black waters calming as night came on, then nothing as far as her eyes could see and space without limit rushing off to the corners of creation. She prayed in Russian and Yiddish to find her family in New York, prayers unheard or misunderstood or perhaps ignored by all the powers that swept the waves of darkness before she woke, that kept "The Mercy" afloat while smallpox raged among the passengers and crew until the dead were buried at sea with strange prayers in a tongue she could not fathom. "The Mercy," I read on the yellowing pages of a book I located in a windowless room of the library on 42nd Street, sat thirty-one days offshore in quarantine before the passengers disembarked. There a story ends. Other ships arrived, "Tancred" out of Glasgow, "The Neptune" registered as Danish, "Umberto IV," the list goes on for pages, November gives way to winter, the sea pounds this alien shore. Italian miners from Piemonte dig under towns in western Pennsylvania only to rediscover the same nightmare they left at home. A nine-year-old girl travels all night by train with one suitcase and an orange. She learns that mercy is something you can eat again and again while the juice spills over your chin, you can wipe it away with the back of your hands and you can never get enough.

〔〔 〕〕 Shutting-down your identity requires a voyage out to K-space interzone. Zootic affectivity flatlines across a smooth cata-tension plateau and into simulated subversions of the near future, scorched vivid green by alien sex and war. You are drawn into the dripping depths of the net, where dynamic-ice security forces and K-guerillas stalk each other through labyrinthine erogenous zones, tangled in diseased elaborations of desire.

What we’re going to find is that it’s often very easy to sponsor the gift – to give it space, to allow it to grow. The greater challenge is often to sponsor the wound, the “demon,” or the shadow. We don’t want to sponsor it – we want to get rid of it, we want to cure it, we want to control it, we want to fight it. But true healing and transformation come from being able to sponsor the wound, sponsor the demon, sponsor the shadow. That

Composers do not remember this lost fatherland, but each of them remains all his life unconsciously attuned to it; he is delirious with joy when he sings in harmony with his native land, betrays it at times with his thirst for fame, but then, in seeking fame, turns his back on it, and it is only by scorning fame that he finds it when he breaks out into that distinctive strain the sameness of which—for whatever its subject it remains identical with itself—proves the permanence of the elements that compose his soul. But in that case is it not true that those elements—all the residuum of reality which we are obliged to keep to ourselves, which cannot be transmitted in talk, even from friend to friend, from master to disciple, from lover to mistress, that ineffable something which differentiates qualitatively what each of us has felt and what he is obliged to leave behind at the threshold of the phrases in which he can communicate with others only by limiting himself to externals, common to all and of no interest—are brought out by art, the art of a Vinteuil like that of an Elstir, which exteriorises in the colours of the spectrum the intimate composition of those worlds which we call individuals and which, but for art, we should never know? A pair of wings, a different respiratory system, which enabled us to travel through space, would in no way help us, for if we visited Mars or Venus while keeping the same senses, they would clothe everything we could see in the same aspect as the things of Earth. The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is; and this we can do with an Elstir, with a Vinteuil; with men like these we do really fly from star to star.

THE MEANING OF A DAY: Each new dawn brings with it 15 new reasons for laughs, 100,000 new heartbeats in your chest, your lifeblood voyages 168,000,000 miles. And each new morning on this earth translates 7,200 earthquakes in the upcoming 24 hours. More than 18,000 thunderstorms, our planet being struck by lightning 8.6 million times. And in space? The passing of a day means the wondrous birth of approximately 275 billion stars. This is why every day is an opportunity for rebirth.

We're always getting caught up in our problems, but what's a hundred years? Human lives are so short. The whole of human history is nothing when you stop and think about outer space. I don't think he was trying to tell me I was going to die at some point or anything like that. It wasn't about me at all. More like there would come a time when the sun would burn out, when human beings and this planet would no longer exist, but the Voyager would still be out there, drifting ever deeper into space. (p408)

Everything about the former colonial administrative offices made Holden sad. The drab, institutional green walls, the cluster of cubicles in the central workspace, the lack of windows or architectural flourishes. The Mormons had been planning to run the human race’s first extrasolar colony from a place that would have been equally at home as an accounting office. It felt anticlimactic. Hello, welcome to your centuries-long voyage to build a human settlement around another star! Here’s your cubicle. The space had been

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us… The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life…Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand… 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 with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known. —CARL SAGAN, reflecting on a photograph of Earth taken by the Voyager 1 space probe from a distance of 6 billion kilometers (Pale Blue Dot, 1994)

A pair of wings, a different respiratory system, which enabled us to travel through space, would in no way help us, for if we visited Mars or Venus while keeping the same senses, they would clothe everything we could see in the same aspect as the things of the Earth. The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is; and this we do, with great artists; with artists like these we do really fly from star to star.

Presumably, it won’t be only one way. Even before the age of climate change, the literature of conservation furnished many metaphors to choose from. James Lovelock gave us the Gaia hypothesis, which conjured an image of the world as a single, evolving quasi-biological entity. Buckminster Fuller popularized “spaceship earth,” which presents the planet as a kind of desperate life raft in what Archibald MacLeish called “the enormous, empty night”; today, the phrase suggests a vivid picture of a world spinning through the solar system barnacled with enough carbon capture plants to actually stall out warming, or even reverse it, restoring as if by magic the breathability of the air between the machines. The Voyager 1 space probe gave us the “Pale Blue Dot”—the inescapable smallness, and fragility, of the entire experiment we’re engaged in, together, whether we like it or not. Personally, I think that climate change itself offers the most invigorating picture, in that even its cruelty flatters our sense of power, and in so doing calls the world, as one, to action. At least I hope it does. But that is another meaning of the climate kaleidoscope. You can choose your metaphor. You can’t choose the planet, which is the only one any of us will ever call home.

A pair of wings, a different respiratory system, which enabled us to travel through space, would in no way help us, for if we visited Mars or Venus while keeping the same senses, they would clothe everything we could see in the same aspect as the things of Earth. The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is; and this we can do with an Elstir, with a Vinteuil; with men like these we do really fly from star to star.

When you pack your bags for a big trip, you never know what's in store for you. The Apollo astronauts on their way to and from the Moon photographed their home planet. It was a natural thing to do, but it had consequences that few foresaw. For the first time, the inhabitants of Earth could see their world from above—the whole Earth, the Earth in color, the Earth as an exquisite spinning white and blue ball set against the vast darkness of space. Those images helped awaken our slumbering planetary consciousness. They provide incontestable evidence that we all share the same vulnerable planet. They remind us of what is important and what is not. They were the harbingers of Voyager's pale blue dot.

The entire idea of it was arrogant and defiant and grandiose. Anna loved it. As she walked across a wide empty plain of steel that should have been covered in topsoil and crops, she thought that this audaciousness was exactly what humanity had lost somewhere in the last couple of centuries. When ancient maritime explorers had climbed into their creaking wooden ships and tried to find ways to cross the great oceans of Earth, had their voyage been any less dangerous than the one the Mormons had been planning to attempt? The end point any less mysterious? But in both cases, they’d been driven to find out what was on the other side of the long trip. Driven by a need to see shores no one else had ever seen before. Show a human a closed door, and no matter how many open doors she finds, she’ll be haunted by what might be behind it. A few people liked to paint this drive as a weakness. A failing of the species. Humanity as the virus. The creature that never stops filling up its available living space. Hector seemed to be moving over to that view, based on their last conversation. But Anna rejected that idea. If humanity were capable of being satisfied, then they’d all still be living in trees and eating bugs out of one another’s fur. Anna had walked on a moon of Jupiter. She’d looked up through a dome-covered sky at the great red spot, close enough to see the swirls and eddies of a storm larger than her home world. She’d tasted water thawed from ice as old as the solar system itself. And it was that human dissatisfaction, that human audacity, that had put her there. Looking at the tiny world spinning around her, she knew one day it would give them the stars as well.

I know that I am going to meet a personal variation on reality; a partial view of reality. But I know also that by that partiality, that distancing from the shared experience, it will be new: a revelation. It will be a vision, a more or less powerful or haunting dream. A space-voyage through somebody else's psychic abysses. It will fall short of tragedy, because tragedy is the truth, and truth is what the very great artists, the absolute novelists, tell. It will not be truth; but it will be imagination. Truth is best. For it encompasses tragedy and partakes of the eternal joy. But very few of us know it; the best we can do is recognize it. Imagination - to me - is the next best. For it partakes of Creation, which is one aspect of the eternal joy. All the rest is either Politics or Pedantry, or Mainstream Fiction, may it rest in peace.

The world outside of me has no meaning independent of my thinking it. (pauses to look) I look out of the window. A garden. Trees. Grass. A young woman in a chair reading a book. I think: chair. So she is sitting. I think: book. So she is reading. Now the young woman touches her hair where it's come undone. But how can we be sure there is a world of phenomena, a woman reading in a garden? Perhaps the only thing that's real is my sensory experience, which has the form of a woman reading- in a universe which is in fact empty! But Immanuel Kant says- no! Because what I perceive as reality includes concepts which I cannot experience through the senses. Time and space. Cause and effect. Relations between things. Without me there is something wrong with this picture. The trees, the grass, the woman are merely- oh, she's coming! (nervously)- she's coming in here-! I say, don't leave!-where are you going?

Whereas Einstein was not the James Joyce of scientists and James Joyce was not the Einstein of novelists who no one could go beyond because beyond was a space where all is curved and comes around again to its beginning in a relative sort of way and after all isn't that what a river does always turning back upon itself like a serpent eating its tail which is life itself and everyone's life like a rushing stream down a mountain into the greatest river and the river always coming back to itself after it flows to the ocean and returns in clouds and rain and sunsets although today sunsets are dying the rivers dying and how much longer will the river be returning and returning as if a river really ever could come home again with its voyagers and that far wanderer James Joyce always leaning back to listen to old River Liffey telling him the great tale always whispering to him that wake of words for all of us to wail upon along a riverrun homing in the gloaming

What am I to do? Death is on my trail, and life is fleeting away; teach me something with which to face these troubles. Bring it to pass that I shall cease trying to escape from death, and that life may cease to escape from me. Give me courage to meet hardships; make me calm in the face of the unavoidable. Relax the straitened limits of the time which is allotted me. Show me that the good in life does not depend upon life's length, but upon the use we make of it; also, that it is possible, or rather usual, for a man who has lived long to have lived too little. Say to me when I lie down to sleep: "You may not wake again!" And when I have waked: "You may not go to sleep again!" Say to me when I go forth from my house: "You may not return!" And when I return: "You may never go forth again!" You are mistaken if you think that only on an ocean voyage there is a very slight space between life and death. No, the distance between is just as narrow everywhere. It is not everywhere that death shows himself so near at hand; yet everywhere he is as near at hand.

Once I leave — once I start the car or catch the bus to the airport, by which the voyage is initiated — my brain starts to relax at the absence of my things, and thus the familiar thoughts that they inspire. And it is not just about the books and trinkets on my desk, because a real trip usually means leaving behind innumerable other forms of familiarity: the faces and the voices that we know well, and which cause their own cataracts of memories and associations through their long histories with us. There are the sounds we always hear, and the recognition of what caused them, like the scraping of the gate at the construction site across the square from my apartment, which arrives every morning at 7 a.m. There are the quotidian streets of daily life, lined with memories of events at each address. The shops and offices we visit most often; the foods we buy, with their familiar tastes as we eat them. But as we go away from these things, our own thoughts change, or grow into the space previously occupied by the familiar. The light itself becomes different once we start to travel, as we change setting, latitude, or geography. And with these changes, with the disappearance of the familiar and its many calls upon our thoughts, we finally begin to think differently, or even just begin to think at all.

STANKEVICH The world outside of me has no meaning independent of my thinking it. (pauses to look) I look out of the window. A garden. Trees. Grass. A young woman in a chair reading a book. I think: chair. So she is sitting. I think: book. So she is reading. Now the young woman touches her hair where it's come undone. But how can we be sure there is a world of phenomena, a woman reading in a garden? Perhaps the only thing that's real is my sensory experience, which has the form of a woman reading- in a universe which is in fact empty! But Immanuel Kant says- no! Because what I perceive as reality includes concepts which I cannot experience through the senses. Time and space. Cause and effect. Relations between things. Without me there is something wrong with this picture. The trees, the grass, the woman are merely- oh, she's coming! (nervously)- she's coming in here-! I say, don't leave!-where are you going? MICHAEL Father's looking for me anyway. . .(gloomily) I've had to ask him to settle a few debts here and there in the world of appearances, so now he's been busy getting me a job. Liubov enters from the garden, with her book. LIUBOV Oh!-(noticing Stankevich) Excuse me- MICHAEL Nobody seems to understand Stankevich and I are engaged in a life-or-death struggle over material forces to unite our spirit with the Universal

STANKEVICH The world outside of me has no meaning independent of my thinking it. (pauses to look) I look out of the window. A garden. Trees. Grass. A young woman in a chair reading a book. I think: chair. So she is sitting. I think: book. So she is reading. Now the young woman touches her hair where it's come undone. But how can we be sure there is a world of phenomena, a woman reading in a garden? Perhaps the only thing that's real is my sensory experience, which has the form of a woman reading- in a universe which is in fact empty! But Immanuel Kant says- no! Because what I perceive as reality includes concepts which I cannot experience through the senses. Time and space. Cause and effect. Relations between things. Without me there is something wrong with this picture. The trees, the grass, the woman are merely- oh, she's coming! (nervously)- she's coming in here-! I say, don't leave!-where are you going? MICHAEL Father's looking for me anyway. . .(gloomily) I've had to ask him to settle a few debts here and there in the world of appearances, so now he's been busy getting me a job. Liubov enters from the garden, with her book. LIUBOV Oh!-(noticing Stankevich) Excuse me- MICHAEL Nobody seems to understand Stankevich and I are engaged in a life-or-death struggle over material forces to unite our spirit with the Universal- and he has to go to Moscow tomorrow!

When he’d ordered the Aphrodite converted to accommodate passengers, the builder had given him an option. Did he want four gentlemen’s cabins, similar to the ladies’? Or would he prefer to squeeze six smaller berths into the same space? Gray’s answer? Six, of course. No question about it. Two extra beds meant two extra fares. He hadn’t dreamed he’d one day occupy one of these cramped berths. Six feet of angry man, lashed into a five-foot bunk, in the midst of a howling gale-it wasn’t a recipe for a good night’s sleep. Gray craved the space and comfort of his former quarters aboard the Aphrodite-the captain’s cabin. But as his brother had so officiously pointed out, Gray wasn’t the captain of this ship anymore. Throw his arse in the brig, had Joss threatened? Gray tossed indignantly, his chest straining against the ropes hat held him in the child-sized bed. The ship’s brig didn’t sound so bad right now. He’d put up with a few iron bars, the rancid bilgewater and rats, if it meant he could stretch his legs properly. Hell, this room was so damned small, he couldn’t even get his blasted boots off. He kicked the wall of his berth, no doubt scuffing the shine on his new Hessians. He hated the cursed things anyway. They pinched his feet. Why the devil he’d thought it a brilliant notion to get all dandified for this voyage, Gray couldn’t remember. Just who was he trying to impress? Stubb?

When they had gone less than a bowshot from the shore, Drinian said, “Look! What’s that?” and everyone stopped. “Are they great trees?” said Caspian. “Towers, I think,” said Eustace. “It might be giants,” said Edmund in a lower voice. “The way to find out is to go right in among them,” said Reepicheep, drawing his sword and pattering off ahead of everyone else. “I think it’s a ruin,” said Lucy when they had got a good deal nearer, and her guess was the best so far. What they now saw was a wide oblong space flagged with smooth stones and surrounded by gray pillars but unroofed. And from end to end of it ran a long table laid with a rich crimson cloth that came down nearly to the pavement. At either side of it were many chairs of stone richly carved and with silken cushions upon the seats. But on the table itself there was set out such a banquet as had never been seen, not even when Peter the High King kept his court at Cair Paravel. There were turkeys and geese and peacocks, there were boars’ heads and sides of venison, there were pies shaped like ships under full sail or like dragons and elephants, there were ice puddings and bright lobsters and gleaming salmon, there were nuts and grapes, pineapples and peaches, pomegranates and melons and tomatoes. There were flagons of gold and silver and curiously-wrought glass; and the smell of the fruit and the wine blew toward them like a promise of all happiness. “I say!” said Lucy. They came nearer and nearer, all very quietly. “But where are the guests?” asked Eustace. “We can provide that, Sir,” said Rhince.

Life is pretty short yet magnanimous if we know just how to live right. It isn't that easy, it takes a lot of our soul, sometimes too many broken pieces to finally come together in binding a masterpiece that smiles like a solitary star forever gazing around at the music of an eternal cosmos. The most brutal yet beautiful truth about Life is that It is marked, marked with Time where every moment takes us closer to death, it doesn't have to sound or feel bad or scary because death is the most inevitable truth in this mortal world. While the knowledge of death jolts our mind with the uncertainty of Life, clutches us in the emotion of fear to think of pain or the loss of bonds, when we acknowledge that as a part of our souls' journey and take every moment as our precious gift, a blessing to experience this Life with its beautiful garden of emotions blossoming with wonderful smiles that we can paint on others, then we make our Life magnanimous, then we make even the very face of death as that of an angel coming to take us to a different voyage, soaked in a lot of memories and experiences beautifully binding our soul. I have realised that when we live each day as if it's the last day of our life, we become more loving and gentle to everyone around and especially to our own selves. We forgive and love more openly, we grace and embrace every opportunity we get to be kind, to stay in touch with everything that truly matters. I have realised that when we rise every morning with gratitude knowing that the breath of air still passes through our body, just in the mere understanding that we have one more day to experience Life once again, we stay more compassionate towards everything and everyone around and invest more of our selves into everything and everyone that truly connect and resonate with our soul. I have realised that when we consciously try to be good and kind, no matter however bad or suffocating a situation is we always end up taking everything at its best holding on to the firm grip of goodness, accepting everything as a part of our souls' lesson or just a turn of Time or Fate and that shapes into our strength and roots our core with the truest understanding of Life, the simple act of going on and letting go. Letting go of anything and everything that chains our Soul while going on with a Heart open to Love and a Soul ready to absorb all that falls along the pathway of this adventure called Life. I have realised that when we are kind and do anything good for another person, that gives us the most special happiness, something so pure that even our hearts don't know how deep that joy permeates inside our soul. I have realised that at the end of the day we do good not because of others but because of our own selves, for if tomorrow death comes to grace me I hope to smile and say I have Lived, loved unconditionally and embraced forgiveness, kindness and goodness and all the other colours of Love with every breath I caught, I have lived a Life magnanimous. So each time someone's unkind towards you, hold back and smile, and try to give your warmth to that person. Because Kindness is not a declaration of who deserves it, it's a statement of who you are. So each time some pieces of your heart lay scattered, hold them up and embrace everyone of them with Love. Because Love is not a magic potion that is spilled from a hollow space, it's a breath of eternity that flows through the tunnel of your soul. So each time Life puts up a question of your Happiness, answer back with a Smile of Peace. Because Happiness is not what you look for in others, it's what you create in every passing moment, with the power of Life, that is pretty short when we see how counted it stands in days but actually turns out absolutely incredibly magnanimous when loved and lived in moments.

Somewhere Across the Universe, This Intergalactic Fairytale Is Being Told In the far corner of the Virgo supercluster, a small galaxy called the Milky Way exists, and in one of the further spirals of that galaxy there is said to be a tiny planet called Earth. At a cursory glance, there is nothing seemingly unique about this planet, even though it is simply beautiful, cloaked in calypso blue with an oscillating belt of green. It is, in fact, one of millions like it that live in just this universe.   The extraordinary thing about this planet though, are the beings that exist on it. They have been through war after war. Empires that promised to burn brighter than their resident star, the sun, and disappeared in the blink of an eye. Savage rulers, dictators have destroyed entire portions of it, and yet … they simply refuse to stop existing, it is like they have this treasured thing within them to keep them surviving, and to keep knowing.   Look closer now, oh passer-by, look closer at these beings. They are survivors with a sense of awe and curiosity at everything around them. Sometimes they have lost their way, but this is a thing they never seem to lose, because they are so full of potential.   Promise. This planet may be called Earth, but it should have been called Promise.   If you do not believe this little story, and dismiss it as a silly old wives’ tale, a thing which cannot possibly exist, then I hope you come upon their legendary message. You see, 40 years ago, these beings sent out a message on a space probe that has travelled 20.5 billion kilometres, hoping to meet one of us in space. In it lies a message, the definition of this entire species, and it reads simply:   ‘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.’   The Voyager is still out there, waiting for someone to come upon it. Maybe that someone is you. Maybe you will remind that species of the greatness that lies in their potential, their promise. Maybe you will be the being that turns that fairytale planet of promise into an intergalactic legend of green and blue.

Space is nearly empty. There is virtually no chance that one of the Voyagers will ever enter another solar system—and this is true even if every star in the sky is accompanied by planets. The instructions on the record jackets, written in what we believe to be readily comprehensible scientific hieroglyphics, can be read, and the contents of the records understood, only if alien beings, somewhere in the remote future, find Voyager in the depths of interstellar space. Since both Voyagers will circle the center of the Milky Way Galaxy essentially forever, there is plenty of time for the records to be found—if there's anyone out there to do the finding. We cannot know how much of the records they would understand. Surely the greetings will be incomprehensible, but their intent may not be. (We thought it would be impolite not to say hello.) The hypothetical aliens are bound to be very different from us—independently evolved on another world. Are we really sure they could understand anything at all of our message? Every time I feel these concerns stirring, though, I reassure myself. Whatever the incomprehensibilities of the Voyager record, any alien ship that finds it will have another standard by which to judge us. Each Voyager is itself a message. In their exploratory intent, in the lofty ambition of their objectives, in their utter lack of intent to do harm, and in the brilliance of their design and performance, these robots speak eloquently for us. But being much more advanced scientists and engineers than we—otherwise they would never be able to find and retrieve the small, silent spacecraft in interstellar space—perhaps the aliens would have no difficulty understanding what is encoded on these golden records. Perhaps they would recognize the tentativeness of our society, the mismatch between our technology and our wisdom. Have we destroyed ourselves since launching Voyager, they might wonder, or have we gone on to greater things? Or perhaps the records will never be intercepted. Perhaps no one in five billion years will ever come upon them. Five billion years is a long time. In five billion years, all humans will have become extinct or evolved into other beings, none of our artifacts will have survived on Earth, the continents will have become unrecognizably altered or destroyed, and the evolution of the Sun will have burned the Earth to a crisp or reduced it to a whirl of atoms. Far from home, untouched by these remote events, the Voyagers, bearing the memories of a world that is no more, will fly on.

Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: "I seek God! I seek God!" --As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lost his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated?--Thus they yelled and laughed. The madman jumped into their minds and pierced them with his eyes. "Whither is God?" he cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him--you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions. Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying as though an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Had it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. "How shall we comfort ourselves. the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under out knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us--for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto." Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground and it broke into pieces and went out. "I have come too early," he said then; "my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightening and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the most distant stars--and yet they have done it themselves" It has been related further that on the same day the madman forced his way into several churches and there struck up his requiem aeternam deo. Led out and called to account, he is said to always have replied nothing but: "What after all are these churches now if they are not tombs and sepulchers of God?

the magazine’s reporter encountered Steve manning the Apple Computer booth at a computer fair. “I wish we’d had these personal machines when I was growing up,” Jobs tells him, before continuing on for a total of 224 words: “People have been hearing all sorts of things about computers during the past ten years through the media. Supposedly computers have been controlling various aspects of their lives. Yet, in spite of that, most adults have no idea what a computer really is, or what it can or can’t do. Now, for the first time, people can actually buy a computer for the price of a good stereo, interact with it, and find out all about it. It’s analogous to taking apart 1955 Chevys. Or consider the camera. There are thousands of people across the country taking photography courses. They’ll never be professional photographers. They just want to understand what the photographic process is all about. Same with computers. We started a little personal-computer manufacturing company in a garage in Los Altos in 1976. Now we’re the largest personal-computer company in the world. We make what we think of as the Rolls-Royce of personal computers. It’s a domesticated computer. People expect blinking lights, but what they find is that it looks like a portable typewriter, which, connected to a suitable readout screen, is able to display in color. There’s a feedback it gives to people who use it, and the enthusiasm of the users is tremendous. We’re always asked what it can do, and it can do a lot of things, but in my opinion the real thing it is doing right now is to teach people how to program the computer.” Before moving on to a booth where a bunch of kids were playing a computer game called Space Voyager, the reporter asks if Steve “would mind telling us his age. ‘Twenty-two,’ Mr. Jobs said.” Speaking off-the-cuff to a passing journalist from a decidedly nontechie publication, Steve finds so many ways to demystify for the average person the insanely geeky device that he and Woz had created.

That was the other advantage to walking. It gave you time to think. To explore things down to the roots. If a voyage was a transition from one place to another, it made sense for it to take place over a transition in time, too. Cars, planes, they obliterated that transition, making a separation in space less real. Less meaningful. It removed the chance for growth. No wonder everyone had been so damn confused and angry before.

Voyager, man. Remember? The space ships we sent out to explore the Universe back in 1977? They put some gold records in the capsules, in case there’s intelligent life out there. Sound recordings and stuff. And pictures of what we look like, you know, I think they put Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man on it, and some math formulas. Even if they can’t figure out anything else, the math has to be universal.” Daniel had forgotten about this, but now he remembered. There was even more on the phonograph records than Owen was babbling about. As he recalled, they contained information about topics such as our location in the solar system, mathematical definitions, the physical unit definitions we use, our solar system parameters, chemical definitions, our DNA structure, diagrams of male and female human anatomy and cell division, a diagram of conception, a fetus development diagram and much more. And, if he remembered correctly, it was meant not only for intelligent extra-terrestrials, but for future humans as well, should it come back to Earth in the distant future.

If the new world exploration did not come to anything like its happy expected fulfillment even in North America, where the odds were more favorable, it was because the new colonizers and settlers brought so much of the Old World in their refined equipment and their brutal customs with them. The wonder is rather that the hopeful dream has remained alive for so long, for some of its original luminosity still dazzles and blinds the eyes of many of our contemporaries who continue to pursue the same archaic fantasies, planning further voyages through outer space. Contemporary 'space age' prophets, who proclaim space exploration as the endless frontier and astronauts as the coming pioneers, throw an unrealistic glamour over both the past, and even more, the future of such efforts.

Like many other merchant vessels, the Sea Venture was armed. Though England and Spain had signed a peace treaty in 1604, soon after James took the English throne, there were still scores of Spanish vessels sailing the Atlantic and the Caribbean just waiting to fall on ships like the Sea Venture. And since the Spanish continued their claim to the lands the English knew as Virginia, the company had every reason to fear Spanish attempts to keep it from resupplying Jamestown. The “admiral” herself carried sixteen cannon and at least one small swivel gun that could be used to repel boarders. To save space below, where passengers and stores would be jam-packed for the voyage, these heavy guns were mounted on the Sea Venture’s upper deck instead of on the main deck, or in the ’tween deck area, their usual location. As Newport and Somers looked at the heavy cannon—minions that weighed 1,500 pounds each, sakers that weighed 3,500 pounds, and demi-culverins that tipped the scales at 4,500 pounds each, as well as the smallest of the guns, falconers, that weighed as much as two large men—their eyes would have narrowed with concern as they imagined how all that weight topside would unbalance the vessel in strong seas and high winds.

more than one hundred Virginia-bound settlers would squeeze themselves into a space not much larger than a middling-sized English cottage. By that time, carpenters would almost certainly have built crude partitions dividing the already small space into a maze of tiny compartments designed to provide some privacy for the passengers who would soon be jammed on board. From below, the three would have climbed a ladder to the mate’s cabin, situated just below the great cabin aft and now turned into a crowded dormitory for a few of the gentlemen settlers who were making the voyage to Virginia.

if i add that my uncle took mathematical strides of exactly three feet, and that, while walking, he firmly clenches his fists-the sign of an impetuous temperament-then you will know him well enough not to wish to spend too much time in his company

SPACE... it's fucking big. These are the voyages of the starship, A.S.F. Willful Child. Its ongoing mission: to seek out strange new worlds on which to plant the Terran flag, to subjugate and if necessary obliterate new life life-forms, to boldly blow the...

The demonic delight, which radiated in the train of these thoughts through the whole being of Master Peter, was so deliciously transporting that it carried him away altogether from his material position at that moment, and bore him aloft, as if in a chariot of air and fire, a chariot that flew upward upon the waving of two wings, one of which might have been Space and the other Time, for both together seemed to acquire a mysterious force that soon carried their voyager into a sleep, if sleep it were, where he found himself in reality, if reality it were, beyond all description by the words the human race has hitherto used.

So people say, what is there to be positive about? What is there to hope for? And my answer is always the same—Voyager. The two spacecraft we threw out into space with the hope of a planet behind them. One of them carrying a letter that said, “We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours”. The most hopeful letter any human being ever wrote. Our thoughts, our languages, our music all travelling now through interstellar space. The odds of either Voyager being intercepted within our lifetimes are infinitesimal, but that’s not the point. The point is that one day, so many days into the future we can’t even comprehend the number, some bored lifeform might scoop up a dead, battered piece of junk and find a planet’s hope inside. And if, against all odds, they can understand it, they might just train their sights on our backwater of space and find the place we once occupied and think, Damn. We missed a trick there. So here we are, going about our lives, and all the while the Voyagers are out there, hurtling onward. Every day you wake up they’re just a little bit closer to something amazing. And that’s what makes me smile every time I think of it. Voyager, and the journey never-ending.

The digients storm off in different directions, and he wonders if he’s made the right decision. It hasn’t always been easy raising Marco and Polo, but he’s never rolled them back to an earlier checkpoint. This strategy has worked well enough so far, but he can’t be certain it will keep working. There are no guidebooks on raising digients, and techniques intended for pets or children fail as often as they succeed. The digients inhabit simple bodies, so their voyage to maturity is free from the riptides and sudden squalls driven by an organic body’s hormones, but this doesn’t mean that they don’t experience moods or that their personalities never change; their minds are continuously edging into new regions of the phase space defined by the Neuroblast genome. Indeed, it’s possible that the digients will never reach “maturity”; the idea of a developmental plateau is based on a biological model that doesn’t necessarily apply. It’s possible their personalities will evolve at the same rate for as long as the digients are kept running. Only time will tell.

The future is, like you previously insinuated, no-man’s-land. What manifests is as dependent on the minds of the voyagers as the conditions of the reality they left behind. Everything matters, because it is not simply a by-product of space and time so much as a continuation of space and mind. In order to enter this realm, a guide is needed, an extremely powerful one no less.

The guard looked again at the card, and then said as he handed it back, “Nexialism? What’s that?” “Applied whole-ism,” said Grosvenor, and stepped across the threshold.

That’s right,” said Grosvenor, “stand up for your rights. The whole universe is in deadly danger, but your sense of dignity must be maintained.

And you matter to me. I pray that, even though things in your life are scary or uncertain or up in the air right now, you know you can rest. You can rest because you are not alone. You can rest because of who Jesus is and what he has done. You can rest because nothing you do can make him love you more or less, and because no matter how hard life gets, nothing that happens to you can destroy you. You are free because he is the resurrection and the life. Not someday. Today. Right now.

film

Let's imagine we're standing together on the launch pad at NASA's Cape Canaveral facility near Orlando, and staring up at the stars together. As I write this, the last constellation above the horizon is Centaurus. The centaur's front head is a bright star. In fact, it's three stars—a pair called Alpha Centauri A and B, and, dimmest of the trio, Proxima Centauri. Here, look through this telescope. See? You can tell them apart. But what we can't see is that there is, in fact, a planet circling the faint light of Proxima Centauri. Man, I wish we could see it. Because that planet, Proxima Centauri b, is the nearest known exoplanet to Earth. [...] If we were to board a spacecraft and ride it from the outer edge of our atmosphere all the way to Proxima Centauri b, you and I, who boarded the ship fit and trim, chosen as we were from billions of applicants, would die before the voyage reached even 1/100th of the intervening distance. [...] At a speed of 20,000 miles per hour—the speed of our top-performing modern rockets—4.2 light years translates to more than 130,000 years of space travel. [...] So how will we ever get there? A generation ship. [...] the general notion is this: get enough human beings onto a ship, with adequate genetic diversity among us, that we and our fellow passengers cohabitate as a village, reproducing and raising families who go on to mourn you and me and raise new of their own, until, thousands of years after our ship leaves Earth's gravity, the distant descendants of the crew that left Earth finally break through the atmosphere of our new home. [...] A generation ship is every sociological and psychological challenge of modern life squashed into a microcosmic tube of survival and amplified—generation after generation. [...] The idea of a generation ship felt like a pointless fantasy when I first encountered it. But as I've spent the last few years speaking with technologists, academics, and policy makers about the hidden dangers of building systems that could reprogram our behavior now and for generations to come, I realized that the generation ship is real. We're on board it right now. On this planet, our own generation ship, we were once passengers. But now, without any training, we're at the helm. We have built lives for ourselves on this planet that extend far beyond our natural place in this world. And now we are on the verge of reprogramming not only the planet, but one another, for efficiency and profit. We are turning systems loose on the decks of the ship that will fundamentally reshape the behavior of everyone on board, such that they will pass those behaviors on to their progeny, and they might not even realize what they've done. This pattern will repeat itself, and play out over generations in a behavioral and technological cycle.

Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing.