What Will the Stars Look Like When We Visit Them?
The short film Wanderers, narrated by Carl Sagan, recreates stunning spatial views that, one day, we may be lucky enough to visit.
As we were growing up, many of us learned astronomy with Carl Sagan’s documentary series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. He taught us that science, more than a body of knowledge is a way of thinking, and that for small creatures such as ourselves, the immensity is only endurable through imagination. This awe-striking short brings Sagan back and, above all, makes us yearn even more for a journey across the stars.
Wanderers, by digital artist and animator Erik Wernquist, combines impressive space visualizations, which in addition are also one hundred percent real, with the narration of A Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of Human Future in Space, by Carl Sagan.
“Maybe it’s a little early,” says Sagan while the film transports the viewer to the fantastic landscapes of distant moons and planets. “Maybe the time is not quite yet. But those other worlds, promising untold opportunities, beckon. Silently, they orbit the sun, waiting.”
The film’s hyper-realistic photography is a series of digital recreations of photographs and data compiled by NASA and other astronomic organizations, which means that these are not mere fantasy driven speculations; they are precursors of the views that we may perhaps see in person one day.
Thus, all lovers of the backbone of the night —as Carl Sagan called the Milky Way— of dark stardust, will be grateful for the visual possibilities of jumping from Uranus’ tallest cliff or of witnessing an anticyclonic storm from Jupiter, known as the “large red dot”.
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