Tag / space

by crowfooted

westbrookwestbooks:

swanjolras:

gosh but like we spent hundreds of years looking up at the stars and wondering “is there anybody out there” and hoping and guessing and imagining

because we as a species were so lonely and we wanted friends so bad, we wanted to meet other species and we wanted to talk to them and we wanted to learn from them and to stop being the only people in the universe

and we started realizing that things were maybe not going so good for us– we got scared that we were going to blow each other up, we got scared that we were going to break our planet permanently, we got scared that in a hundred years we were all going to be dead and gone and even if there were other people out there, we’d never get to meet them

and then

we built robots?

and we gave them names and we gave them brains made out of silicon and we pretended they were people and we told them hey you wanna go exploring, and of course they did, because we had made them in our own image

and maybe in a hundred years we won’t be around any more, maybe yeah the planet will be a mess and we’ll all be dead, and if other people come from the stars we won’t be around to meet them and say hi! how are you! we’re people, too! you’re not alone any more!, maybe we’ll be gone

but we built robots, who have beat-up hulls and metal brains, and who have names; and if the other people come and say, who were these people? what were they like?

the robots can say, when they made us, they called us discovery; they called us curiosity; they called us explorer; they called us spirit. they must have thought that was important.

and they told us to tell you hello.

So, I have to say something. 

This is my favorite post on this website. 

I’ve seen this post in screenshots before, and the first time I read it, I cried. Just sat there with tears running down my face. 

Because this, right here, is the best of us, we humans. That we hope, and dream of the stars, and we don’t want to be alone. That this is the best of our technology, not Terminators and Skynet, but our friends, our companions, our legacy. Our message to the stars. 

I’m flat out delighted, and maybe even a little honored, that I get to reblog this.

by crowfooted

child-of-thecosmos:

Carl Sagan recognised that the Voyager mission offered two free tickets to something approaching eternity. He assembled a small team to create a message to any civilisation that might, one day, encounter the derelict spacecraft.

Become an extraterrestrial archaeologist for a few moments. An artefact has been fished out of the interstellar ocean. It was made by beings that lived about a billion years ago. What would you make of them and their world? They sent us their music, greetings in 59 human languages, and one whale language; and a sound essay that includes a Saturn V rocket launch, a mother’s first words to her newborn baby, the brainwaves of a young woman newly fallen in love, and the sound of a pulsar.

– Episode 13: Unafraid of the Dark, Cosmos: A SpaceTime Odyssey

You can listen to the contents of the Voyager Golden Record here.

by crowfooted

Forget stardust—you are iron. Your blood is nothing but ferrous liquid. When you bleed, you reek of rust. It is iron that fills your heart and sits in your veins. And what is iron, really, unless it’s forged? You are iron. And you are strong.

n.t. (via thelittle-hobbit)

Damn right you’re iron, and do you know where iron comes from? Do you know how iron gets here? Let me tell you.

It does start with a star, but it’s not some dismal castoff from an eternal beauty, it’s so much more. Everything that makes our world came from stars, but nothing had as much effect on that star as iron.

See the sun burning in the sky? The light you see and the heat you feel are created when the sun fuses elements, the building blocks of our world, into new and heavier elements. The sun lives because more energy comes from that process than is needed to support it.

UNTIL IRON COMES ALONG.

Fusing iron — burning it to make a star shine — is nigh on impossible. Iron is strong and iron is heavy. Iron is so strong and so heavy that to make new elements from iron takes more energy than it produces. The star can’t keep up, it starts to die.

The iron that flows through your veins KILLED A STAR.

Those other metals that we so value, like gold, owe their existence to iron. As the star died it collapsed, crushing itself and making gold and platinum and other precious and powerful things. Then it exploded and scattered those metals throughout space.

Chief among them was iron. The iron whose formation was the death knell of the star. The iron whose intensity made other metals possible. The iron that was the last thing the living star could make.

Stars lived to make iron.

Stars died to make you.

(via noctumsolis)