Life in optical

Check out this great animation!

What I like about it: It’s fun, it’s well illustrated, it’s entertaining, and it tells a story packed with information both in the script and in the images and that’s one of the best formats to get something across. And it ends by teasing our imagination :)

Well done Vancouver Film School students Leo Aguiar, Jaime Arvizu, and Tyler Lemermeyer!

This is the landing of STS-129, after which only 5 shuttle trips are left. Right now there are 5 people in space. That’s where they live. Isn’t it just amazing? We are capable of building machines that sustain people in orbit around the Earth and travel up and down to that place back and forth.

And when we come back from the Space Station, the shuttle lands us on a tiny strip of concrete that exists only on one place on Earth. It can aim for that basically in free-fall and land perfectly. Wow.

Seeing what we can do, who wouldn’t want to go into space?

Humans have done it again. They’ve sent a big eye out into space to explore further and that eye has looked back, time to catch a glimpse the Earth. It’s a rare occasion when the whole planet fits into a picture frame. In this case, we are seeing an Earth-wide sunset, or perhaps a sunrise? … and lots of night.

Were it not for the sunlight, we would in fact see nothing, nothing at all. So between nothing and nothing, what is it that tears us apart? What are those lines we draw between people on land, in the seas, in our minds? What are those tools we use to draw them – pens, fences, concrete walls, country borders, beliefs, personal convictions?

What can such things possibly mean when we are capable of sending out a spacecraft that, looking back, captures this thin crescent of Earth – let alone building it, designing it, or dreaming it in the first place?

Isn’t this Earth an incredibly special place if only because it is inhabited by people who can dream that big?

So why are we wasting so much life on breaking it apart, tearing it into small pieces, separated by barriers so high that we lose the perspective that this image gives back to us, the feeling of floating out in an immense and beautiful expanse of space, the urge to hold on to each other and to what we share?

Images like these carry possibly the strongest message that science has brought us. Our place in the universe. And that place is this little blue crescent. What a tribute to Carl Sagan who would have turned 75 a few days ago and who knew how to express this vision like no other:

“Fanatic ethnic or religious or national identifications are a little difficult to support when we see our planet as a fragile, blue crescent fading to become an inconspicuous point of light against the bastion and citadel of the stars. “

Thank you Rosetta for this beautiful image. (More information on this image)

Astronomy gives perspective.

It’s written all over this blog. It’s one of the founding philosophies of my work, and a personal conviction.

But because we are human, and we have to be told certain things over and over again, sometimes the messages falls short of accomplishing the change – the acquisition of perspective – that it is supposed to achieve.

This morning I was listening to the July 17 episode of the Science@NASA podcast, with the appealing title: “Exploring the Moon, Discovering Earth”.

It is a piece about how the photographs of the Earth taken by the astronauts going to the moon were serendipitous, and about how they captured the collective imagination and inspired people all around the world.

I quote:

For the first time in history, humankind looked at Earth and saw not a jigsaw puzzle of states and countries on an uninspiring flat map – but rather a whole planet uninterrupted by boundaries, a fragile sphere of dazzling beauty floating alone in a dangerous void. There was a home worthy of careful stewardship.

The late nature photographer Galen Rowell described this photo as “the most influential environmental photograph ever taken.”

“It changed humanity’s entire orientation,” says Kristen Erickson of NASA headquarters in Washington, DC. ”

I’m loving it. This is exactly the message I keep telling everyone I meet, and they all understand it, even if it’s the first time they hear it.

And then, in a crash, the whole perspective going on here becomes – again – the exclusivity of certain nations and not others.

In his recent confirmation hearing to take NASA’s helm as administrator, former astronaut Charles F. Bolden Jr. said, “I dream of a day when any American can launch into space and see the magnificence and grandeur of our home planet.”

So close. So close to having learnt something from seeing the planet uninterrupted by boundaries. But not quite there yet.

And it doesn’t matter whether it was a briefing to the government or not, if you claim to change humanity’s orientation – and this does – you should include humanity in your dreams.

So yes, NASA, go back to the moon, by all means, and learn that lesson all over again, please!…

I am loving this timelapse movie!