Apologies in advance for the length of this copy and paste. It just felt right to place it here.
The following is something I received in an email that I subscribe to. Popova mentions Voyager, it’s Golden Record and the notion that it will continue to careen throughout space long after we are all gone, however that may come about. My dad, Don Ennis, who passed away almost two years ago worked in Voyager while he was a workstudy student at Jet Propulsion Laboratories. He had the distinct privilege of etching his name somewhere on that craft. It gives me some comfort in these times to think of Voyager moving through space carrying his name aboard:
“Meanwhile, someplace in the world, somebody is making love and another a poem. Elsewhere in the universe, a star manyfold the mass of our third-rate sun is living out its final moments in a wild spin before collapsing into a black hole, its exhale bending spacetime itself into a well of nothingness that can swallow every atom that ever touched us and every datum we ever produced, every poem and statue and symphony we’ve ever known — an entropic spectacle insentient to questions of blame and mercy, devoid of why.
In four billion years, our own star will follow its fate, collapsing into a white dwarf. We exist only by chance, after all. The Voyager will still be sailing into the interstellar shorelessness on the wings of the “heavenly breezes” Kepler had once imagined, carrying Beethoven on a golden disc crafted by a symphonic civilization that long ago made love and war and mathematics on a distant blue dot.
But until that day comes, nothing once created ever fully leaves us. Seeds are planted and come abloom generations, centuries, civilizations later, migrating across coteries and countries and continents. Meanwhile, people live and people die — in peace as war rages on, in poverty and disrepute as latent fame awaits, with much that never meets its more, in shipwrecked love.
I will die.
You will die.
The atoms that huddled for a cosmic blink around the shadow of a self will return to the seas that made us.
What will survive of us are shoreless seeds and stardust.”
Maria Popova, Figurings
19 Mar '20 08:59
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