Before sailing into the frigid, interstellar darkness a whimsical looking object carrying with it memories of home, mission to explore the unknown, floating in space, changed orientation as it fixed its electronic gaze on a tiny familiar speck. In the absence of sound its mechanics seemed to glide with balletic ease and precision, cutting through the dark ether, to look back and record a Las Meninas snapshot of a speck of reflected light. This snap came to be known as the Pale Blue Dot taken by a mechanical Astronaftis (literally meaning sailor of the stars) called Voyager 1.
While we are on the topic of scale of this pale blue dot, someone whom I had briefly worked with is on a bicycle trip from London to Kathmandu. Details of the trip and interesting geographies they cycled by have been recorded on their blog. The idea of such a trip is so intimidatingly abstract to me that I may never be able to muster courage to test my levels of patience, stamina and other things that go in such an endeavour, but over time I have come to understand and respect such aspirations. The distance between London to Kathmandu maybe an abstract number, most of us fly over but for Lonkat team it must be a far richer understanding of the scale of this number.
In the light of the past few weeks, when "there are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happen", this tiny blue speck seems to resonate with all its elemental spectrum as a group of people cycle across the globe, a tsunami and a earthquake causes destruction, some people protest for freedom and some wage wars.
While we are on the topic of scale of this pale blue dot, someone whom I had briefly worked with is on a bicycle trip from London to Kathmandu. Details of the trip and interesting geographies they cycled by have been recorded on their blog. The idea of such a trip is so intimidatingly abstract to me that I may never be able to muster courage to test my levels of patience, stamina and other things that go in such an endeavour, but over time I have come to understand and respect such aspirations. The distance between London to Kathmandu maybe an abstract number, most of us fly over but for Lonkat team it must be a far richer understanding of the scale of this number.
In the light of the past few weeks, when "there are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happen", this tiny blue speck seems to resonate with all its elemental spectrum as a group of people cycle across the globe, a tsunami and a earthquake causes destruction, some people protest for freedom and some wage wars.
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