Week Three: Leaving Earth– The Pale Blue Dot

Here is my audio narrative.

Chopped from pieces of the Apollo 11 Launch that landed us on the moon, Carl Sagan’s Cosmos and Pale Blue Dot, some recordings from Voyager’s Golden Record (Then UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim and a young American child), sounds of Earth from Space, and the audio from 2015′s N7 Day video hyping Mass Effect: Andromeda with a message from Commander Shepard herself, backed by djcrinkles’ remix of Leaving Earth from Mass Effect 3, I hoped to successfully tell a tale of us– the Earth.

Our yearnings to travel beyond, our need to cherish what we have but still look over that horizon to great cosmos beyond. To be aware of our current place in timespace…but also to hope that we will eventually travel to other worlds just as insinuated by Commander Shepard and Andromeda Initiative.

I do apologize for the cruddy audio on Shepard’s lines– they had no version without the background music used so I edited the best I could. And if you could only see my bites I didn’t use! Richard Feynman, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Carolyn Porco, Brian Cox…

Admittedly melodysheep’s Symphony of Science half inspired this….

Transcript:

[Audio from the Apollo 11 Launch, which I am finding  hard to transcribe.]

Sagan: The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

Shepard: We are travelers, constantly moving forward and looking back. Alone, and as one.

Sagan: In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

Shepard: We have no choice but to try, for our insatiable curiosity,

Waldheim: We know full well that our planet and all its inhabitants are but a small part of this immense universe that surrounds us and it is with humility and hope that we take this step.

Shepard: For our fear of what should happen if we don’t.

Sagan: A new consciousness is developing which sees the earth as a single organism and recognizes that an organism at war with itself is doomed. We are one planet.

Shepard: You are that explorer now, we will say goodbye and you will look back one last time:

Sagan: Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark.

Shepard: And know wherever you go we–

Sagan: Everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.

Shepard: Will be with you.

Sagan: On a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

Shepard:  This is Commander Shepard, signing off.

Waldheim: I send greetings on behalf of the people of our planet. We step out of our solar system into the universe seeking only peace and friendship, to teach if we are called upon, to be taught if we are fortunate…

Child: Hello from the children of planet Earth.