Billions and Billions

Does anyone else remember back in the 1980s when Carl Sagan was on PBS all the time with his show, Cosmos? My dad reckoned himself a very amateur astronomer so he watched the show whenever it was broadcast. All those tales of our solar system - the sun and all the planets, including ours, in orbit around it. Plus his signature line about the seeminly unlimited numbers of suns like ours out there: "Billions and billions..." Do you remember him talking about the Pioneeer and Voyager satellites we sent out into our little neighborhood of the Milky Way galaxy? They carried golden discs with messages from Earth that were selected by a committee chaired by Sagan. They included: "...115 images and a variety of natural sounds, such as those made by surf, wind and thunder, birds, whales, and other animals. To this they added musical selections from different cultures and eras, and spoken greetings from Earth-people in fifty-five languages, and printed messages from President Carter and U.N. Secretary General Waldheim. Each record is encased in a protective aluminum jacket, together with a cartridge and a needle. Instructions, in symbolic language, explain the origin of the spacecraft and indicate how the record is to be played. The 115 images are encoded in analog form. The remainder of the record is in audio, designed to be played at 16-2/3 revolutions per minute. It contains the spoken greetings, beginning with Akkadian, which was spoken in Sumer about six thousand years ago, and ending with Wu, a modern Chinese dialect. Following the section on the sounds of Earth, there is an eclectic 90-minute selection of music, including both Eastern and Western classics and a variety of ethnic music."

I found an old NASA press release which describes how Voyager 1 is leaving our neighborhood. It's probably gone by now, in fact. It is over 8 billion miles away. Just try to fathom that distance. Out there where the solar winds no longer roar.

The Eagle Nebula. Billions and more billions of miles away. Here a wonderful Martian landscape.



And here's us.



A little blue-green speck in a vast ocean. I miss Carl Sagan. I miss his childlike wonder at the universe, his sheer awe of its size and our place in it. Looking at these pictures really lets you know your place in the universe. Better than being put into the Total Perspective Vortex.