Read Issue 67 of Digital Art Live
Welcome to our “Cosmos” themed issue, a small tribute to the huge life and work of Carl Sagan. To begin, please note we have no connection with his family or estate, and that this is a purely fannish tribute which makes use of the public domain and various original material offered by creative artists.
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Inside this issue
CARL SAGAN Via the public domain, we‘re pleased to have a long interview with Carl Sagan himself, on space imaging and more.
SCIENTIST | WRITER
“… we were able to turn the cameras [on Voyager] to photograph the Earth. A single pale blue dot. … Just a pinpoint of reflected sunlight. All those billions of miles away. I find that a chilling, spine-tingling, exciting, perspective-raising, consciousness-raising experience.”
Ratimir has crafted many acclaimed short films, one of which is about the boyhood of Carl Sagan in Brooklyn, New York City.
BLENDER | FILM-MAKING
“Blender is my primary tool of choice when it comes to 3D modeling and animation. I‘m as software-agnostic as a CG generalist can get, but I find Blender super-comfortable. So much power in such a comparatively tiny package!”
Young Christian Cline has made a fine new 320-page book, in the spirit of Sagan‘s interest in scientific exobiology.
PHOTOSHOP | BOOKS
“… the world of digital book publishing is so strict [in what it will accept], that you have to be really decisive with formatting, text, the like. It was pretty difficult at first, especially, however once I figured out the ins and outs it became much more streamlined.”
Ali Reis makes fabulous nebula artworks of the cosmos, and these have been seen in many leading TV series and movies.
NEBULA ART | FRACTALS | SCREEN VFX WORK
Also find inside…
- EDITORIAL
- CARL SAGAN BIOGRAPHY
- GOLDEN RECORD
- SPACE ART PLUGINS
- BACK ISSUES
- CONTESTS
- INTERVIEW: ALI RIES
- GALLERY
- IMAGINARIUM
Interview Snippet from Issue 67
Via the wonders of the public domain, we‘re pleased to have an interview with Carl Sagan himself, in which he talks about the intricacies of space imaging, the ‘pale blue dot‘, and the inspiration we gain from ambitious exploration.
DAL: Carl, welcome. To begin down here on Earth… on our ‘pale blue dot‘. What might you say to those people who claim that ‘we should fix our own house‘ before we even think of venturing into space?
CS: [Well, it must be] possible to make a better life for everyone here on Earth and at the same time to reach for the planets and the stars. The cost of even a very ambitious program of human space flight is not that much. And for 99.9 percent of our tenure until now on Earth, human beings were wanderers… hunter-gatherers. It must be that the hunter-gatherer lifestyle is built into us. It‘s in some people more than others, it‘s hard to express in this city-fied and highly populated age. But it must be there. It‘s deeply built into us. Now, for the first time, we are in this circumstance of living in a world in which almost everything except the ocean bottom is explored. We‘ve been almost everywhere, we humans. And so this urge for exploration has no outlet — except that at just this same moment, the universe has opened up to us. Now we have a much vaster arena for our exploratory propensities than the mere surface of one small planet circling one small star. The only obvious vent for the exploratory urge is the exploration of other worlds. [NASA‘s Moon mission] Apollo 11 was exploration [and in such early exploration] the hazard is an inseparable component of the glory. [But I have to say that, after the Apollo programme the NASA manned missions became rather] unexciting, fundamentally dull. No risks of the exploratory sort. In my view, seven people poured into a tin can, put up 200 miles, and coming down a week later with newts, is not exploration. It is a capability without a mission.
DAL: And does not generate anywhere near as much optimism for the future of humanity…
CS: And yet there is a desperate need for a positive vision of the future. We need it for our children. What organization in the U.S. government, in the natural course of doing business, offers a positive view of the future? What agency is future-oriented by its very nature? What agency excites the visions of young people, makes their hearts beat a little faster, makes them imagine doing exciting exploratory things when they grow up? As far as I can tell, there‘s only one such organization, and that‘s NASA. [And there is a key reason to keep NASA going into space. The chance of a future large asteroid impact on the Earth means that] a significant human presence in the inner solar system beyond the Earth is mandated. It is safer for the human species if we‘re on many worlds, than if we‘re on only one.
DAL: Indeed, a key reason. Are there other reasons to explore and settle, in your view?
CS: First of all, if you buy my argument that exploring is built into us genetically, then there is no ‘why‘, any more than we ask ‘why‘ we humans enjoy being in each other‘s company. It‘s just the way we are. Still… I think reasons for exploring are very concrete. The deepest one, to my mind, is that only by knowing what else is possible can we understand ourselves. If you‘re stuck on this planet, you are fundamentally limited in how well you understand your own home.
DAL: I see, so in a way… that addresses the ‘fix our own house first‘ argument? By going into space we learn new ways to ‘fix our own house‘ back home. And also to move beyond the underyling ‘Earth is the fixed steady-state centre of the universe‘ argument?
CS: It‘s of course the most natural thing in the world to think that Earth is not only the center of the Solar System, but the universe — [a nice planet] put there for our edification or amusement. That has been the view of people all over the world, all through human history. And even today, even this minute, it is still with us. We talk about ‘the sun rising‘ and ‘the sun setting‘. There‘s nothing in our language to indicate that it is, in fact, the Earth that‘s turning. I think that while most people were taught that the Earth is round, ‘in their heart of hearts‘ they didn‘t believe it. And it was only after the advent of space exploration and in particular, the early photographs of Earth — mainly from manned missions — looking back and seeing it as a beautiful blue-white jewel set against the black velvet background of space, that people suddenly got a sense of where we are. Suddenly people were struck in the most direct way with a [detailed photographic] portrait of their planet taken from outside. Nothing like that had ever been seen in human history. Now these pictures of Earth are a kind of global icon. You see them everywhere; we have become a little bit habituated to them. But of course, the wonder is there again with each new generation.
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