An amazing project by artist Mishka Henner:
“Astronomical” is a scale model of our solar system in twelve 500 page volumes printed-on-demand. On page 1 the Sun, on page 6,000 Pluto. The width of each page equals one million kilometers.
An amazing project by artist Mishka Henner:
“Astronomical” is a scale model of our solar system in twelve 500 page volumes printed-on-demand. On page 1 the Sun, on page 6,000 Pluto. The width of each page equals one million kilometers.
Seated where he could catch the readings on the two gauges of the Voigt-Kampff testing apparatus, Rick Deckard said, “I’m going to outline a number of social situations. You are to express your reaction to each as quickly as possible. You will be timed, of course.”
from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? the novel that became the film Blade Runner
It is said that the gods play games with the lives of men. But what games, and why, and the identities of the actual pawns, and what the game is, and what the rules are - who knows?
Best not to speculate.
Thunder rolled…
It rolled a six.
The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy is a wholly remarkable book. It has been compiled and recompiled many times over many years and under many different editorships. It contains contributions from countless numbers of travellers and researchers. The introduction begins like this. ‘Space,’ it says, ‘is big. Really bug. You just won’t believe how mindboggingly big it is. I mean you may think it’s along way down the road to the chemist, bet that’s just peanuts to space…’ (After a while the style settles down a bit and it begins to tell you things you need to know, like the fact that the fabulously beautiful planet Bethselamin is now so worried about the cumulative erosion by ten billion visiting tourists that any net imbalance between the amount you eat and the amount you excrete whilst on the planet is surgically removed from your bodyweight when you leave: so every time you go to the lavatory it is vitally important to get a receipt.) To be fair, though, when confronted by the sheer enormity of the distances between the stars, better minds than the one responsible for the Guide’s introduction have faltered. Some invite you to consider for a moment a peanut in Reading and a small walnut in Johannesburg, and other dizzying concepts. The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination. Even light, which travels so fast that it takes most races thousands of years to realize that it travels at all, takes time to journey between the stars. It takes eight minutes to journey from the star Sol to the place where the Earth used to be, and four years more to arrive at Sol’s nearest stellar neighbour, Alpha Proxima. For light to reach the other side of the Galaxy, for it to reach Damogran for instance, takes rather longer: five hundred thousand years. The record for hitchhiking the this distance is just under five years, but you don’t get to see much on the way.
