carl sagan, saint of space

Film still from Dario Robleto's transcendent "Ancient Beacons Long for Notice."

Last year, I saw the projected experience, "Ancient Beacons Long for Notice," at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth. (Yes, it's a film, but it so, so much more than a film.) On the surface, it's about the making of the Golden Record, an LP containing sounds and images that is affixed to the side of each Voyager spacecraft. Sounds and images of what? Well, that is the story.

Here is your task. Assemble a collection of audio recordings and visual images that communicate information about our planet and its inhabitants to forms of intelligence completely unfamiliar with us. And, oh, by the way, these encounters could happen 10, 100, 1,000 or more years in the future. What would you incorporate? And, oh, also by the way, the storage space on this information medium is extremely limited.

The story of the creation of the Golden Record is already remarkable, but nestled within it is a love story. The beating heart of this creation is a love story. And the brainwaves of that beating heart is an aural part of the story.

Carl Sagan, astronomer extraordinaire, met and fell in love with his wife, Ann Druyan, during the making of the Golden Record. The relationship developed primarily through phone conversations as the two collaborated on the project. Love was in the air and about to launch into space.

Druyan wanted to include on the LP an EEG recording of her brainwaves as she meditated important events and people in our planet's history. Two days before the EEG, she and Sagan decided to get married. Love, then, permeates this hour-long recording--a recording compressed into one minute.

Why do I call Carl Sagan a saint of space? What is a saint? Someone who inspires us with their dedication, their exceptional accomplishments, and their love. Sagan loved Ann, for sure, but I think Sagan loved the cosmos almost as much. Oh, and saints often leave behind relics. Sagan did. He left the Golden Record, wending its way through that cosmos, going farther than any human-created vehicle has ever traveled, out beyond the heliosphere.

I learned about all this watching Dario Robleto's film that warm Texas autumn day, cocooned in a cool, dark museum screening room. It was as magical as my first peek into a kaleidoscope. Images unfolding and merging, overlaying one another, appearing and then evaporating. The story spiraling out into a glorious, ever widening vision of humanity, of cosmos, of the transcendent and the tragic. It is neither an exaggeration or overstatement to say that watching that film was one of the ten most affecting experiences of my life. Perhaps for that reason, too, I elevate Sagan to saint.