A new short film by Erik Wernquist combines visual animation of alien locations with selections of the audio recording of Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot. Titled “Wanderers,” the film is a beautiful, romantic vision of human life extending beyond our own world.
I love this short film. Wernquist’s visuals and Sagan’s words, they tap deep and powerful roots in the brain and the body.
There is an attraction and beauty in the human longing for remoteness and adventure. Sagan, quoting Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, says, “I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts,” and I am moved by the words.
That sentiment has been popular of late. In Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, Matthew McConaughey’s Coop longs to extend the life of the human race by moving off-world. Coop, surveying his dying crops and the life his children will inherit, says, “Mankind was born on earth. We were never meant to die here.”
It’s a moving statement for a science-fiction film about space travel and black holes. But Coop’s words have bothered me ever since I walked out of Interstellar.
I am taken by the romance of space-travel and human exploration, of the search for knowledge and new worlds. The continued exploration of the cosmos is as exciting an endeavor as any undertaken in the history of our species. The celebration of science and learning that has accompanied this endeavor can never be undervalued. With every new robotic landing and rover mission, the potential for humans to one day leave earth becomes more real, if not inevitable.
But as all this happens, humanity is simultaneously facing one of the greatest threats our species has ever encountered: climate change. I wonder, lately, if the vision of leaving our world for a new home might transition from an endeavor of discovery to a fatalistic view of our own planet, dying at our hands because we’re not meant to die here.
As we look up to the heavens and see our future, let’s not look down at the earth, like Coop, and see only our grave. There’s plenty more to see here than the place we have to escape.
