Carl Sagan’s Message to Mars Explorers, with a Gentle Warning

“Whatever the reason you’re on Mars is, I’m glad you’re there. And I wish I was with you.”

Several months before his death in 1996, Carl Sagan — who twenty years prior had co-composed the Arecibo message as part of the Communication with extraterrestrial intelligence (CETI) project and sent the Golden Record into space — sat down in his home at 900 Stewart Avenue in Ithaca, New York, and recorded a moving message to the future explorers, conquerors, and settlers of Mars. As NASA’s Curiosity Rover makes history this week, Sagan’s words echo with even more poignancy and timeliness.

Maybe we’re on Mars because of the magnificent science that can be done there — the gates of the wonder world are opening in our time. Maybe we’re on Mars because we have to be, because there’s a deep nomadic impulse built into us by the evolutionary process — we come, after all, from hunter-gatherers, and for 99.9% of our tenure on Earth we’ve been wanderers. And the next place to wander to is Mars. But whatever the reason you’re on Mars is, I’m glad you’re there. And I wish I was with you.

But some sixteen years prior, in Chapter V of his legendary Cosmos, titled “Blues for a Red Planet,” Sagan had voiced a gentle lament reminding us to keep our solipsistic anthropocentrism in check:

The surface area of Mars is exactly as large as the land area of the Earth. A thorough reconnaissance will clearly occupy us for centuries. But there will be a time when Mars is all explored; a time after robot aircraft have mapped it from aloft, a time after rovers have combed the surface, a time after samples have been returned safely to Earth, a time after human beings have walked the sands of Mars. What then? What shall we do with Mars?

There are so many examples of human misuse of the Earth that even phrasing this question chills me. If there is life on Mars, I believe we should do nothing with Mars. Mars then belongs to the Martians, even if the Martians are only microbes. The existence of an independent biology on a nearby planet is a treasure beyond assessing, and the preservation of that life must, I think, supersede any other possible use of Mars.

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A Three-Movement Choral Suite Based on Carl Sagan

“Something incredible is waiting to be known.”

What could be better than the solar system set to music in a near-perpetual homage to Bach? Little, but a three-movement choral suite inspired by Carl Sagan might be it — a magnificent mashup of Sagan’s timeless words set to harmonizing voices and an awe-inspiring montage of space exploration footage. Here’s to cosmic goosebumps, courtesy of Canadian composer and teacher Kenley Kristofferson.

If we do not destroy ourselves, then we will someday venture to the stars.

Download the mp3 here. See more of ‘s Sagan tributes, though not choral, here. Then revisit the excellent Sagan Series and dip into Sagan’s own mind.

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The Art of War: The Ancient Chinese Classic Adapted for Dystopia circa 2032

A graphic novel about heroism, corporate greed, and the convergence of Wall Street and Chinatown.

Some two thousand years ago, Chinese general Sun Tzu penned The Art of War — an ancient military treatise that went on to become one of the most timeless and revered strategy books of all time, its insights extending beyond the military and into just about every domain of tactical intelligence. In The Art of War: A Graphic Novel (public library), writer Kelly Roman and illustrator Michael DeWeese adapt the classic to a futuristic world where wars are waged on a militarized Wall Street, China is the dominant global superpower, and Sun Tzu’s ancient teachings unfold in a dystopian interplay between corporate greed and the undying human capacity for empathy.

Though exceedingly gory and lacking the edutainment value of graphic novels as serious nonfiction, The Art of War: A Graphic Novel peels away the many layers of what heroism means, what it can be and should be, to paint a portrait of a world that might be around the corner if we don’t align our corporate strategies with our cultural and human values.

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The Father of Modern Meteorology Pays Homage to Jonathan Swift in a Scientific Verse, 1920

Literature and science converge in a playful riff on a riff on a riff.

Remember the first poem published in a scientific journal? The one that turned out not to be the first? Reader Marco F. Barozzi ups the dramatic ante by pointing out in an email that while J. Storey’s may have been the first scientific paper written entirely in verse, verses already appeared in a work of the English physicist and mathematician Lewis F. Richardson (1881-1953), who pioneered the application of physics and computational mathematics to weather forecasting. In 1920, he used a quatrain as an epigraph of his paper “The supply of energy from and to Atmospheric Eddies,” published in Issue 686, Volume 97 of the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society of London.

After his studies of air turbulence led him to develop the Richardson criterion, a measure of the ratio of buoyant to mechanical turbulence, he delivered his breakthrough in a clever rhyme playing on “Poetry, a Rhapsody,” a famous Jonathan Swift poem about fleas, and on the parody of Swift by Augustus De Morgan, A Budget of Paradoxes:

Big whorls have little whorls
That feed on their velocity,
And little whorls have lesser whorls
And so on to viscosity

The riff on Swift:

So, naturalists observe, a flea
Has smaller fleas that on him prey;
And these have smaller still to bite ’em;
And so proceed ad infinitum.

And the riff on De Morgan:

Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ’em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.
And the great fleas themselves, in turn, have greater fleas to go on;
While these again have greater still, and greater still, and so on.

What a beautiful testament to the notion that “those persons who have risen to eminence in arts, letters or sciences have frequently possessed considerable knowledge of subjects outside their own sphere of activity” and to history’s contention that the greatest, most original scientists are those who have cultivated wide interests and indiscriminate curiosity.

Everything is, indeed, a remix.

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