![]() At that, Sagan joined Professor Frank Drake of Cornell University and, Sagan’s then-wife, artist Linda Salzman Sagan, to craft this extraterrestrial message. Sagan passed along the idea to NASA, and to his surprise, the suggestion was embraced and approved by every level of the hierarchy. Carl Sagan mere months before launch-a staggeringly brief period in the timescale of the design and test of spacecraft. The suggestion of a message on Pioneer 10 was brought to Dr. This tacked on yet another first: the possibility of the interception of a human machine by an extraterrestrial civilization, providing us the opportunity to make contact with life from another world. Among a succession of firsts achieved by the spacecraft, Pioneer 10 would attain enough velocity to escape the solar system. This space vehicle was designed to explore the environment of Jupiter, along with asteroids, solar winds, and cosmic rays. In the continued spirit of our collaboration, Lia describes the process, her many ways of looking, in her own words.In 1972, an attempt to contact extraterrestrial life was cast into space with the launch of the Pioneer 10 spacecraft. I was fascinated by Lia’s process and observed her experimenting until she honed in on a theoretical framework for the paintings. Later, under the confines of the pandemic, we worked remotely, looking together at influences Lia gathered until she had created a generous visual complement to my narrated imaginings. That night, in the bar of the Ace hotel in Manhattan, our collaboration began organically as we plotted out ideas on napkins. Lia loves science, loves space, loves time, loves black holes, loves thinking about black holes, loves making me talk about black holes after the aforementioned too-many-martinis. Over too many martinis with my dear friend Lia Halloran, I was lamenting my inability to provide this important aspect of the guide. ![]() Though they were crucial for my experience in these thought-journeys, I did not have the skill or the visual vocabulary to render the drawings coherently or beautifully. I drew them by hand infinitely many times and eventually finessed them digitally. Photo: Janna Levin.įor the survival guide, I had mock ups of each of the images that formed the pivots of the journey in and around black holes. After seemingly endless revisions of the calculations and drawings, I then have to recount the experience of that fantastical terrain in a completely different written language.Ī page from my research notes on the Penrose Process around a charged black hole. The accompanying images tend to be loose and symbolic but encapsulate entire concepts. I can only calculate on unlined paper and the marks vary in size, getting crisper and relatively smaller (though not objectively small) and more controlled as I rework the ideas through the math. My black hole calculations rarely involve words but often involve drawings. Hence, the irony of trying to visualize them. Only the empty event horizon remains, invisible, unless light rains near enough to cast the shadow. The star continues to fall, leaving behind an archeological imprint in the shape of space, the famed event horizon, a profound and unassailable demarcation in the universe. In the final death throes, collapse is alarmingly swift and inevitable, crushing the stellar plasma to less than a millionth its original expanse until not even its own light can escape. The death state of the heaviest stars, black holes are themselves no more than a shadow. They are an austere and flawless emptiness, an abyss in spacetime. ![]() The book is a field guide from a lifetime of thought experiments, explorations of the imagination, and attempts to narrate an encounter with an invisible void.ĭark against a dark sky, black holes are nothing and look like nothing. ![]() Black Hole Survival Guide is the lean distillation of my own strange trip into the universe’s most enigmatic phenomenon. ![]()
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