Week 9: Space and Art


Space has been a point of interest of mankind for our entire existence. From the days of Galileo as he used his small telescope to try to prove the earth revolved around the sun, to our current world in which we have powerful telescopes able to see deep into space. We use all sorts of technology to explore space so its fitting that we end with this topic because it brings all the others full circle.


Galileo and his telescope.
In the video "The Pale Blue Dot" Carl Sagan gives us a reality check and shows us the furthest picture of Earth, which not surprisingly looks like a pale blue dot. He goes onto describe how insignificant Earth is compared to the rest of the universe and how "the earth is just a small stage in a vast cosmic arena". On our small stage however we have created a society that competes with each other to be the "momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. By taking a step back and looking at it this way we see how in the larger view of the universe, our small world and civilization is very insignificant.

The "Pale Blue Dot"

Space is depicted in many films as a futuristic heaven of light speed vehicles and laser guns in which interplanetary travel is of common knowledge. Truth is, we're far from this, we're very far from this, we don't even know which direction we should be looking in to get to this level of technology. We don't know exactly what futuristic spaceships will look like or what kind of creatures will roam some far off planets so it's up to the directors who create movies to imagine how some of these things might look. We don't know a lot of specifics about far off space which gives these artists almost free reign to conceptualize how these things may look.

One of the spaceships capable of light speed travel
from Star Trek.

Sources:

 Darknlooking. "Carl Sagan - Pale Blue Dot." YouTube. YouTube, 2007. Web. 4 June 2017.

 Foust, Jeff. "When space and art intersect." The Space Review: When space and art intersect. N.p., n.d. Web. 04 June 2017.

 Lamp, Lucy. "Elements of Art: Space." Sophia. N.p., n.d. Web. 04 June 2017.

 Musk, Elon. "How Close Are We To Bringing Star Trek Technologies to Life?" Futurism. N.p., 16 Sept. 2016. Web. 05 June 2017.

 "What is Space Art?" International Association of Astronomical Artists. N.p., n.d. Web. 05 June 2017.

 Pictures

 http://www.historytoday.com/sites/default/files/telescope.jpg

 https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/71/PaleBlueDot.jpg/220px-PaleBlueDot.jpg

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