“For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.”
Carl Sagan, Contact
The photo above is of the earth (see the tiny pale blue dot; that’s it) as seen from Voyager 1.
I’ve been reading a lot lately, and my reading list is filled with tales of fantastic real-life adventures (or near-enough), elaborate science fiction, or a combination of the two. I’ve certainly been needing an escape from all that’s going on, so that might be what’s driving me to these. I think more than that is that these stories have been feeding my optimism and sense of awe in a way that I’m not getting through other sources.
I recently finished Carl Sagan’s only fiction novel, Contact, and it found me at just the right time.
Contact is a 1985 hard science fiction novel by American scientist Carl Sagan. It deals with the theme of contact between humanity and a more technologically advanced extraterrestrial life form. It ranked No. 7 on Publishers Weekly‘s 1985 bestseller list. The only full work of fiction published by Sagan, the novel originated as a screenplay by Sagan and Ann Druyan (whom he later married) in 1979; when development of the film stalled, Sagan decided to convert the stalled film into a novel. The film concept was subsequently revived and eventually released in 1997 as the film Contact starring Jodie Foster.
I missed the film adaptation (I graduated high school in ’97!), but I am going to go back and watch it, along with any other Sagan-related goodies out there, starting with this:
Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot
Comments welcome!