The Varieties of Scientific Experience  by Carl Sagan

Published posthumously in 2006, this book is based on Sagan’s 1985 Gifford Lectures, a prestigious series of talks delivered annually in Scotland since 1888. The speakers are pre-eminent in their fields. One of them, William James, gave a series called The Varieties of Religious Experience. Sagan’s title is a play on that name. In these lectures the astronomer confronted directly the religious question he was so often asked at his lectures, Do you believe in God?

Sagan’s discussion of the topic is perceptive, original, and artfully expressed.     In a time when science literacy among the citizenry is low and trending lower, this book presents the case for both the necessity and the advantages of science-as-worldview. I think it is one of his most powerful and important books. It shows how extraordinary people can continue to contribute even after their deaths, an afterlife I think even Carl would have acknowledged.

Now the Canadian author and scholar John Robert Colombo has published an essay comparing the Sagan lectures with those of William James. I commend it to your attention at

http://ccwe.wordpress.com/2012/05/09/john-robert-colombo-william-james-carl-sagan-two-gifford-lectures/

John Robert Colombo is a distinguished Canadian author and man of letters. I had the pleasure of working with him on another Sagan project: the DVD Visions of Mars, an anthology of science fiction about Mars, now aboard NASA’s Phoenix lander, somewhere in Mars arctic tundra, awaiting a readership of future Mars colonists from Earth centuries from now.

Learn more at:

http://www.space.com/4166-space-library-heads-mars.html

Colombo’s encyclopedic literary knowledge reached across borders and languages to help assemble the greatest cultural variety of contents. He was equally at home commenting on the authors of pulp fiction of the 1930s or  unearthing  an obscure review by Jorge Luis Borges of of Ray Bradbury’s classic  The Martian Chronicles (also on the disk) Colombo also collected the Inuit name of Mars, which appears on the title screen of Visions of Mars (top left vertical script ).

 John Robert was on the editorial board which also included Carl, Planetary Society Director Louis Friedman (who was the originator of the whole library-to-Mars idea) Toronto science fiction librarian Lorna Toolis, me, and Judith Merrill.

Colombo and I had became friends through Judy , a famous sf editor and writer who, as it happens, was an idol of the young Carl Sagan. When he was a student at the University of Chicago, Carl even asked her to critique some science fiction he had written. I hope those stories surface someday!

In 1975 I arranged a reunion dinner for them in Toronto at Mika’s Japanese restautant, near the old CBC Radio building on Jarvis St. in Toronto, where Judy and I were making radio shows for the CBC documentary program IDEAS . Also in attendance was IDEAS producer Max Allen, with whom I was making a radio documentary about the Viking Mars mission. 20 years later Max made important contributions to Visions of Mars, including recording the sound and image of both Judy and Carl for the Greetings section of the Mars disk. They, and Louis Friedman and Arthur C. Clarke, voice their greetings to a future audience of humans on Mars.

I enjoy recalling how this extended network of friends and colleagues performed a kind of creative dance over the decades, working on projects that in one way or another brought us all together to Mars,  part of a gift now actually, incredibly on Mars, stalwart silica awaiting its future audience.

That’s another of kind afterlife that I think Carl would have been pleased to acknowledge.

The Visions of Mars disk on Mars, aboard NASA’s Phoenix lander

A recent news item in the New York Times caught my attention.                                                        I found the picture particularly intriguing.

The story by Sindya Bhanoo said:         

A new study suggests that the Athabasca Valles, a group of valleys near the Martian equator, were not formed by ice, as some scientists have theorized. Instead, high-resolution images of the valleys reveal more than 250 coiling spiral patterns that closely resemble lava flows on the Big Island of Hawaii.

That’s not the only formation on the Big Island these features resemble. With tongue planted firmly in cheek, I offer the comparison below, where I’ve superimposed a Google Earth map of own street, Painted Church Rd. in Honaunau, The spiral feature seen there is Earth’s largest model of the Milky Way Galaxy, the 100’ diameter Galaxy Garden. See  www.galaxygarden.net

Are we seeing evidence of a galaxy garden on Mars, perhaps built by ancient Martians, or perhaps by visitors from elsewhere playing in the sand of the Red Planet?

Bhanoo’s article goes on to posit a purely geological explanation for the spiral features:

And that means the valleys on Mars were probably formed by volcanic activity, said Andrew J. Ryan, the planetary scientist at Arizona State University who discovered the coils.  Mr. Ryan, a first-year doctoral student, reported the findings in the journal Science, along with his colleague Philip R. Christensen, also a planetary scientist at Arizona State.

The Hawaiian coils were produced by a shearing effect, in which lava flows at different speeds and in different directions. It is likely that something similar happened on Mars, Mr. Ryan said.

You can read the entire article http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/01/science/volcanic-activity-played-role-in-mars-valleys-study-suggests.html

Like the notorious “Face on Mars”, these spiral features are almost certainly natural in origin. The “Face” was merely an inkblot test that showed the human propensity of seeing faces in clouds, or the face of Jesus on a tortilla. These martian spirals, however, are real and not just in the eye of the beholder.

The scientist in me realizes that there are natural formations. Still, I can’t help but wonder…. Consider: what other subject matter for art or sculpture are we likely to share with ETs? If they have art at all, might it perhaps be inspired by their own planet’s landscapes and life forms, all alien to our eyes. But one awe-inspiring object for portraiture is the spiral galaxy that we both share. I wouldn’t be surprised if explorable model galaxies were a common feature of civilized worlds throughout the Milky Way.

And even if these spirals are simply geological, they might still have a special importance. The physicist Paul Davies has argued that we should keep our eyes peeled for alien artifacts left in our solar system long, long ago by visitors from far, far away, like the monoliths in Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Such artifacts might be left where we could find them, say on the top of the highest mountain or bottom of the deepest crater on the Moon or Mars. If I were an alien, a feature resembling the Milky Way might seem a plausible site that would attract the attention of other galaxy-conscious beings.

The Athabasca valley on Mars has many of these spiral forms. Could this be a model of our entire Local Group of galaxies? I’ll have to get out my Atlas of the Universe and look more carefully.

                      ENCYCLOPEDIA GALACTICA, mixed media on Masonite, 1972

Forty years have passed since Carl Sagan and I met.
He was the truest Citizen of the Galaxy that ever was.
In early 1972 I wrote him a fan letter motivated by the launch of NASA’s Pioneer missions, the first to reach Jupiter and Saturn. They were the first spacecraft to leave the solar system, containing the now iconic plaque of interstellar greeting devised by Carl and Frank Drake, featuring humans beautifully drawn by Linda Salzman Sagan, then Carl’s wife. Nobody knows whether the message will ever reach extraterrestrials, but it certainly reached me. I was thrilled and inspired by the idea that real astronomers, not UFO loonies, were attempting interstellar communication, attempting to log onto the Encyclopedia Galactica (that’s what Carl called it then; today I guess we’d speak of the Galactic Internet.)

One of the first paintings I did in homage to Sagan’s vision was titled                   Encyclopedia Galactica. It shows the user interface of a search engine to find galactic civilizations—and how our own entry might read in English translation. Thia was the first painting of the Milky Way Galaxy that I ever did.

In 1972, shortly after I had moved to Toronto, I wrote Carl a letter of appreciation for his words and deeds, trying to express how powerfully I had been affected by his ideas and by their manifestation in the Pioneer plaque. He wrote back an enthusiastic letter in which he said some nice things about my paintings. And he invited me to meet him in the Toronto airport, where he was making a flight connection on his way back from Nova Scotia.          He had been there to observe the solar eclipse on July 10, as a guest of the Canadian industrialist and philanthropist Cyrus Eaton.

Carl had told me the day and approximate time he would arrive, but neglected to mention the airline, flight number, or which city he was flying in from. It was actually remarkably similar to the central problem of interstellar communication: How do you find someone you are looking for when you haven’t pre-arranged a meeting place? The problem is the same whether you are searching the vastness of New York City or the electromagnetic spectrum. You could search at random, with little chance of success. Or you might concentrate your search on landmarks known to you both, such as the Empire State Building (in the case of New York) or the natural emission frequency of interstellar hydrogen (in the case of the radio spectrum).

The airport was a simpler case. I could position myself so that most of the disembarking passengers from domestic Canadian flights would have to walk past me. But neither Carl nor I knew the other’s appearance. What landmark would both of us recognize? The solution I came up with was the Drake Equation, written N=R*FpFlFiFc x L. Carl had discussed this formula at great length in Intelligent Life In The Universe, a groundbreaking book he co-authored with the Russian astrophysicist Iosep Shklovskii.         I reasoned that on that particular day in the Toronto International airport he, and only he, would be able to recognize and understand it. [Frank Drake invented the equation that bears his name as a way of calculating the number of civilizations in the galaxy as a function of various factors such as the fraction of stars that have planets, the fraction of planets that have life, and so forth.  It was one of the most well known equations among scientists interested in extraterrestrial life.]

I wrote the equation in black magic marker on a big piece of paper, taped it to the outside of my portfolio, and went to the airport. I wandered around the gates as planes arrived. Many people eyed me suspiciously, wondering what cult I was hawking, until a tall, dark-haired man came towards me with a big grin and outstretched hand saying, “Hi, I’m Carl. That was a great method for finding me. I thought you’d have me paged, but this is far more elegant”

We talked for two hours in the airport about astronomy, science fiction, art, and the Encyclopedia Galactica. Then he had to catch another plane back to Ithaca. “Look”, he said” I’ve just signed a contract with Doubleday to write a book for a popular audience. Would you like to illustrate it? Yes? Good! Can you come down to Ithaca within the next few weeks and we’ll talk about it?”

Shortly afterward I drove down to Ithaca, New York, home of Cornell University and Sagan’s Laboratory for Planetary Studies The back of my car was filled with artwork I wanted to show him.

When he saw the Encyclopedia Galactica painting, Carl’s reaction was “I’ve been waiting to see this painting my whole life!” He asked to use it as the cover for his book Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence  [MIT Press, 1972 the proceedings of a now-classic international conference held in 1972 in Byurakan, Soviet Armenia.]

Carl bought the painting and he paid me in something far more precious than money—he gave me a back-up Pioneer plaque, one of the spares they had left over. He, Frank, and Linda all signed the back of it. It was like receiving a signed home run baseball from the World Series. It hung in my home for years, then spent 15 years on display at the National Air and Space Museum, part of the gallery Where Next Columbus?, for which I was commissioned to paint my Portrait of the Milky Way.

In the years that followed I did several more paintings in this series, most of them after discussions with him or Frank Drake.  The concept of the Encyclopedia Galactica eventually found its way into the COSMOS series as title of Episode12. I’ll post others in the series on this blog from time to time. Would that be of interest to you, reader?

It has been 40 years since my journey with Carl began, and I like to think of it continuing still, beyond even our deaths, as our Voyager Record cruises towards the stars.

 To purchase print click here

The Kepler Telescope in space is discovering new planets almost too fast to keep track of. And observatories on Earth like Keck and Subaru on Mauna Kea are confirming the findings and adding additional information about the stars these planets orbit.

Now we are even hearing about exoplanets roughly the size of Earth, even some in habitable zones around their mother star.

This heady burst of discovery reminded me of a painting I did many years ago, decades before the first exoplanets were found.

I was inspired by Stephen Dole’s book Planets for Man that suggested how planets might form and how Earthlike planets might be abundant in the Milky Way Galaxy. I was also thinking of Olaf Stapledon’s visionary suggestion in Starmaker that “a constant stream of touring worlds [was} percolating through the Galaxy.”

And why limit exploration to just our Universe? In my painting a fleet of Earthlike planets is emerging from a supermassive wormhole into another Universe. Of course they have brought a little of their own spacetime with them to buffer any adverse effects from a different cosmos.

Compared to that, Kepler’s recent discoveries are practically down the street. That’s literally true if you consider our little Orion Arm as a small side street in a megalopolis of stars. The field of view of Kepler is looking “upgalaxy” along the spiral arm, looking towards our Orion Arm’s intersection with the much larger Sagittarius Arm.

The Galaxy Garden provides a useful way of visualizing Kepler’s discoveries. A 3-foot long section of 1” plastic PVC pipe scales to one kiloparsec, Kepler’s range at the approximate aperture of the field of view of the telescope.

This short length of pipe gives these planets a context. They are only one footstep away in the Galaxy Garden. From Earth you can almost reach out and touch them (if your arms are a kiloparsec long) At 600 and 1000 light years the two most promising star systems are close neighbors on our little arm of the Milky Way.

                                                                                                              Visit Our Gallery                                                Like Us

One of the many pleasures of living on the Big Island of Hawaii is that astronomy and space exploration are considered local news. I like that idea of “local”. It’s similar to the concept of “galacticity”, as coined by Steve Durst, founder and president of the International Lunar Observatory Association (ILOA)..

Galacticity is the perspective that sees our world set against its real backdrop—the vast Milky Way Galaxy. I recently returned from a trip to Asia with Steve, where he brought me to speak about the Galaxy Garden at his Galaxy Forum events in Beijing and Tokyo, where we hope to find partners in creating “sister” galaxy gardens in China and Japan.(News about that exciting trip in an upcoming post)

Steve is working with another old friend, Bob Richards, a lunar explorer whose company Moon Express (ME) is vying for the $30 million Google X Prize. The prize will be awarded to the first private, non-governmental group that can send a small spacecraft to soft-land on the Moon, traverse a distance of 500 meters, and transmit a hi-def image and video back to Earth. Bob’s venture, ME, is considered a serious contender by our knowledgable sources.

The payload that ME will carry is the ILOA’s project—the first astronomical observatory to operate remotely on the lunar surface. As a gesture of galacticity, the “first light” image that traditionally heralds the existence of new observatories will take as its first image, the center of the galaxy. One more small step for Man, or at least machine.

ILOA Engineer Jason Dunn in the Galaxy Garden.

ILOA’s crack team of young talent was at the summit of Mauna Kea the other day, testing the telescope they will send to the Moon.  See a nice photo of Bob Richards and the accompanying story  on the front page of West Hawaii Today at

http://www.westhawaiitoday.com/sections/news/local-news/lander-telescope-clears-trial-hurdle.html

Also, Moon telescope tested on Earth

http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/12/19/9565921-moon-telescope-tested-on-earth

and     TELESCOPE TO GO WHERE NO TELESCOPE HAS GONE BEFORE

http://news.discovery.com/space/telescope-to-go-where-no-telescope-has-gone-before-111219.html

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

Contact: Jon Lomberg
P.O. Box 207
Honaunau, Hawaii 96726 USA
lomberg@aloha.net
www.jonlomberg.com
808-328-9598

Honaunau, Hawaii, Dec.2, 2011

CURIOSITY’S MARTIAN SUNDIAL: an instrument and a special message is sent to Mars aboard NASA’s latest mission.

Artist Jon Lomberg, working with a team of space scientists, announces the launch of a new message artifact destined for the surface of Mars: a sundial whose four edges each contain a panel of text and image, written by Jim Bell and the MER sundial team and accompanied by graphics designed by Lomberg.

NASA’s latest and most ambitious scientific mission to Mars is the Mars Science Lander called Curiosity. Like its predecessors on NASA’s Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity, this new sundial doubles as the camera color calibration target for the Mastcam camera system that is the rover’s primary instrument for imaging the surface of Mars. Mastcam was developed for NASA/JPL by Malin Space Science Systems, Inc. of San Diego CA, under the guidance of Principal Investigator Michael Malin.

Curiosity’s calibration target provides a valuable educational activity for students, who can use the image of the sundial transmitted from Mars to Earth to learn about the ways that such simple but elegant instruments can be used to determine the time, date, season, and latitude on a planetary surface. The global spirit of space exploration is symbolized by the decoration on the “face” of the sundial—the names of Mars in 16 languages, including ancient Sumerian, Mayan, Inuktitut, and Hawaiian.

The original idea for the educational project came from Bill Nye The Science Guy, now the Executive Director of The Planetary Society.   MER imaging scientist, Prof. James Bell led the team, which included Lomberg to design the sundial and its message.  Dr. Bell is President of The Planetary Society. 

The message on the edges of Curiosity’s new sundial is not meant for Martians or other extraterrestrials. Rather it is really meant for humans–“martian” humans who will be on Mars, many decades or perhaps even hundreds of years from now. Someday today’s Mars missions will be the stuff of history, and some explorer, prospector or geologist will find our long-lost robots. The message is for them—we hope that they can easily find somebody who understands English, the primary language of the nation that launched this spacecraft.

The illustrations of the message try to evoke our species’ long fascination with the Red Planet. They use classical imagery of the god Ares, as well as astronomers’ drawings of Mars, the Viking lander and other Mars-bound spacecraft. The footprints, in the sands of Mars and the sands of time, symbolize humanity’s wandering spirit that has led us to Mars.

Bell and Lomberg were both on the team that designed the similar sundials on the Spirit and Opportunity rovers. That sundial carried a different date and motto, and a different message along the edges using children’s art and Lomberg’s drawings. That team, Malin, and others also provided advice on Curiosity’s new sundial message, including inputs from Diane Bollen, Lou Friedman, Sheri Klug, Tyler Nordgren, Bill Nye, Steve Squyres, Larry Stark, Woody Sullivan, and Aileen Yingst.

Jim Bell is a planetary scientist from Arizona State University in Tempe AZ, the Payload Element Lead for the Pancam instruments on Spirit and Opportunity, and President of The Planetary Society in Pasadena, CA.

Artist Jon Lomberg was Design Director for  NASA’s Voyager Golden Record and a long-time collaborator of Carl Sagan. He won an Emmy Award for his work as Chief Artist of the TV series COSMOS.

Along with the two sundials on the MER rovers, and the Visions of Mars DVD aboard NASA’s Phoenix mission, this is the fifth message artifact of his design that Jon Lomberg will have launched toward the Mars.  The first was on Russia’s failed Mars 96 mission.  Three have made it there, perhaps destined to be received by some future human society on Mars. The fifth is now on its way.

For additional information contact:

 Jon Lomberg

P.O. Box 207                                                                                                                          Honaunau, Hawaii 96726 USA                                                                                                     808-328-9598  

e-mail us: http://jonlomberg.com/contact_jon.html

visit us:   www.jonlomberg.com

The Planetary Society                                                                                                                85 South Grand                                                                                                                       Pasadena, CA 91105 USA 

Phone:  626-793-5100                                                                                                                  Fax:       626-793-5528                                                                                                                     E-mail: tps@planetary.org

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        Picture Picture captions:

The Sundial aboard NASA’s Curiosity rover.                                                                          (credit: MER Sundial Team)

The message on the edges of the Sundial                                                                                   (credit: Jim Bell and Jon Lomberg)

Portrait of the Milky Way Galaxy

http://jonlomberg.com/dp_gallery8.html

How many planets are there in the Milky Way Galaxy? At least double the estimated number of a few weeks ago. A team of astronomers from the United States, Japan, and New Zealand announced the discovery of planets apparently untethered to any star. See story at

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13416431

 About a month before the paper was published in the journal Nature, astronomer Philip Yock from the University of New Zealand in Auckland contacted me about creating an image for them to accompany the press release announcing their discovery (see image below).

The technique they used to find the new planets was at least as interesting as the planets themselves. Gravitational microlensing takes advantage of the bending of light by objects between the observer and the observed. If the alignment is perfect, the light from the background object will be focused into a ring, a so-called Einstein ring. If the alignment is just a bit less than perfect, the background image will split into two images bracketing object doing the lensing. Close study of this split image tells the mass of the lens.

 We don’t know ahead of time where gravity lenses will appear—it’s a chance alignment and you might have to look at millions of stars to find even one. That’s precisely what the astronomers did. They looked towards to galactic center, where millions of stars were on the field of view. Careful searching of this alignment where the gravity field of view found a few, chance alignments where the gravity lens was visible.

My picture shows one of the planets along with the lensed image of a yellow background star. The mass of the lens is similar to the mass of Jupiter, so the lens must be a planet, not a star. Yet no star is visible near the planet.  While it is hard to put a precise figure on the distance to the planet, it is large, possible as large as 15,000 light years, more than halfway to the center of the galaxy, making it the most distant exoplanet yet discovered.

Were the astronomers incredibly lucky to find a rare, starless planet? That seems very unlikely. If they found any at all, statistics suggests that they are not very rare. If we found one, there must be many billions roaming interstellar space.

But since planets are thought o form around stars, how did one cut loose from its parent and head for interstellar space? There are in fact many mechanisms that could fling a planet out of its solar system including gravitational encounters with other planets or stars and the sudden disappearance of a star’s mass in a supernova explosion. If the planet was not itself destroyed, the sudden radical decrease in the mass of the central star could fling a planet like a stone from a sling.

So, fellow galactic citizens, the galaxy just got even larger and more interesting. What a time to be alive!