Carl Sagan
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Arecibo Elegy
He stands overlooking the vast white dish like milk poured into a jungle-covered bowl and thinks of radiowaves reflecting into the receiver. “How many billions of stars are hosting worlds where life has figured out how to talk across the lightyears?” But to talk in our galaxy means to wait. The speed limit of light…
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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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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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Cosmos Again
The finale of the new Cosmos series filled my heart with the purest sense of the numinous. Out there, in the gaseous clouds and the cosmic background radiation, among the billion billion chunks of ice and rock and the equally enormous numbers of other worlds, exists the wide universe. We are just toddlers come onto…
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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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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…
The Numinous Cosmos 