Carl Sagan
Thoughts and opinions around my hero, Carl Sagan.
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Carl Sagan Portrait
I enjoy portraiture, though often they end up being more caricatures than perfect likenesses. This is a multi-format painting done with Japanese ink, watercolor, color pencil, pastel, and acrylic paints. The subject is Carl Sagan in the middle of speaking to someone(s). Here is our pale blue dot the Earth and in the foreground, Mars.…
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What is the Numinous?
What is the numinous? Why do I use this word as a byline for my personality and view of the world? The classical definition from Webster’s Dictionary is “having a mysterious, holy, or spiritual quality.” I certainly do not believe in the holy or the divine, but I do feel that there are elements of…
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An Appeal
We are standing on the edge of a rapidly eroding sea-cliff. Battered by pounding waves it crashes into the ocean piece by piece, chunk by chunk. The danger of us falling into the churning water is there but it dimly registers in our minds…we think “all we need to do is take a step back”…
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Contact: An Appreciation
Words can barely describe how much I love the book Contact. Carl Sagan gifted the world a vision of the human experience in the cosmos where it could find a place, a home, in the grand scheme of nearly infinite space. He understood that we reach out to touch each other through love. Love is…
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Red Light
I was thinking on something Carl Sagan said about the last perfect day on Earth. One day, in the far future, the sun will one day change from the happy main sequence star we know, to a bloated red giant—many times its original size, engulfing the entire inner solar system. We are standing on…
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By Chance Two Separate Glances Meet
Light exploded around the sky in flashes of blue ice and dragon’s fire red, orange phosphorescence and acid greens. The crowd, thousands thick and thronging the great plaza, all watched together. The celebration was for the achievements of the human race, for all of their hard work, all of their dreaming and hoping. All…
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Carl’s Dream
We look to see the small fires in our galaxy around which float pebbles and gas balloons mostly icy rocks and dots festooned- to be able to discern from a distance their construction, we learn that we exist amongst many worlds- billions in just this whirlpool alone. We now see the exciting possibility that the…
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If Only We Had Taller Been…
There is a video circulating from the 1971 conference revolving around Mariner 9’s mission to the Red Planet. I found it while browsing io9.com- it was embedded in an article describing how NASA has named the Curiosity rover’s landing spot “Bradbury Landing.” There gathered in that room are three of the greatest thinkers of any…
The Numinous Cosmos 