03 September 2010
Their sojourn now interrupted by slow letters home, the twin Voyagers, entering the interstellar medium some 33 years and 15 billion miles after departing Earth, travel mutely towards Eden and the unknown. But as Dennis Overbye writes in a review of the book "Flyby," these doughty ships sail under a different banner. This time - perhaps for the first time - the explorers and the conquests are different, and rather than laying claim to distant shore, the twins take us "metaphorically home."
This is beautiful.
This book blooms with such glorious rushes of exalted prose that I was dog-earing almost every page until I gave up. Contrasting the mission with human explorations from earlier eras, for example, Pyne writes that Voyager was 'a modernist machine loosed onto the cosmos. The Voyagers would not be blinded by gold or the mirage of fame. They would not abandon wife or child, or enslave unwary indigenes. They could not despair, could not be crippled by loneliness, could not fight for the cross or suffer for science, would not know epiphanies or endure tropical fevers. They would lay no claims, issue no proclamations of sovereignty, raise no toasts to king or republic, sign no treaties of trade or military alliance, nor send out reconnaissance parties to lay out routes for folk migration. . . . The Voyagers confronted no Other, or even life.'
Wayne
Being wrong can feel like that, can't it?
