For all of our scientific advances, there are still many questions that remain unanswered. In the new book The Where, the Why, and the How, artists take a stab at explaining those mysteries. For this challenge, we asked you to create an illustration to answer the following question:
Are we alone in the universe?
We are not alone. How presumptuous to think so.
Anne
Studies for the (pre-remembered) "Sightings". 4/4
Deborah
Studies for the (pre-remembered) "Sightings". 3/4
Deborah
Studies for the (pre-remembered) "Sightings". 2/4
Deborah
Studies for the (pre-remembered) "Sightings". 1/4
Deborah
In this painting, "Abyssal Night" I show different deep sea creatures and invent a few of my own. Scientists still know so little about all of the creatures lurking many miles deep in the ocean. It is like having space aliens on earth! Those hot, nutrient rich sulfuric vents in deep underwater mountain gullies congregate organisms... it is a little Adam and Eve orgy down there! Crazy creepy self-lit creatures glide under water through OUR PLANET while we blithely scurry around in our noisy cities. Europa, one of Jupiter's moons is covered in ice and because of the flex and pull of gravity and the possibility of a moving ocean under that ice, scientists speculate it is an abode for extraterrestrial life.... and that's just within our scrappy little inconsequential solar system!
ARE WE ALONE IN THE UNIVERSE? I seriously doubt that .... Battlestar Galactica here we come!!
"Abyssal Night" Copyright 2012 Sarah Olson
Sarah
My heart stopped for 10 minutes as my forehead was being sutured under a general anesthetic following a car accident in Kenya in 1980, erasing my abilities to walk, speak, remember, and all the other skills that we learn after we are born! I recovered those abilities by staggering, walking and jogging the 3.6 miles home from my first job 92 times, and amused myself by considering how we might live through the next million years as a species on a planet with distinctly finite resources.
Please email me for further conclusions about how we might transform all of our activities into those that are 100% sustainable, while we still have the time and resources to do that!
After all the petroleum and coal are gone, and climates irretrievably warmed, we will no longer be able to support populations that have multiplied 17 times since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and 4 times in the last century alone!
The Big Bang Theory comes from the fact that the visible part of the infinite universe IS EXPANDING, which accounts for the fact that our planet has not suffered the bombardment that a planet in a contracting part of the infinite universe would inevitably suffer.
So, yes, an Infinite Universe implies that there are an infinite number of individuals with identical birthdays on identical planets, as well as an infinite number of species that are currently beyond our wildest imaginations!
There is no beginning or end to the lives of the components of the genes that both make and link every one of us, and we bring harm to the environment that supports all of us at great peril to those components, and the descendents that we/those components give rise to!
Kim
This is an acrylic and colored pencil drawing titled "Seekers (4/10)"
I think we are definitely not alone in the universe- this picture depicts an intuition.
Jeneve
My heart stopped for 10 minutes as my forehead was being sutured under a general anesthetic following a car accident in Kenya in 1980, erasing my abilities to walk, speak, remember, and all the other skills that we learn after we are born! I recovered those abilities by staggering, walking and jogging the 3.6 miles home from my first job 92 times, and amused myself by considering how we might live through the next million years as a species on a planet with distinctly finite resources.
Please email me for further conclusions about how we might transform all of our activities into those that are 100% sustainable, while we still have the time and resources to do that!
After all the petroleum and coal are gone, and climates irretrievably warmed, we will no longer be able to support populations that have multiplied 17 times since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and 4 times in the last century alone!
The Big Bang Theory comes from the fact that the visible part of the infinite universe IS EXPANDING, which accounts for the fact that our planet has not suffered the bombardment that a planet in a contracting part of the infinite universe would inevitably suffer.
So, yes, an Infinite Universe implies that there are an infinite number of individuals with identical birthdays on identical planets, as well as an infinite number of species that are currently beyond our wildest imaginations!
There is no beginning or end to the lives of the components of the genes that both make and link every one of us, and we bring harm to the environment that supports all of us at great peril to those components, and the descendents that we/those components give rise to!
Kim
Put this together and feel I was influenced by source from another realm.
Ramon
I was inspired by the Space Western genre of movies and television and also old pirate maps of the "new world". If there is something out there, I'm sure that they are probably looking at a map to find out where we are, as were the navigators of the new world were looking for glory.
India Gates
When I heard the question, I immediately saw the image of a person looking out to the universe and finding several beings looking back. One of the eyes is human -- a reference, I guess, to the idea that if you look far enough you'll eventually see the back of your own head.
I'd planned to use a mix of my drawing and collage materials to make the illustration, but then everything looked better when I made it all myself. It is still mixed-media, I suppose, since I glued on pieces and used marker, watercolor, acrylic paint, charcoal and colored pencil.
Yvonne
This image was taken at sunset on a winter day in Brooklyn (Red Hook docks). Look closely to the area left of the Statue of Liberty and you'll see seven flying objects that have a sort of figure-eight flight path. I took a few more shots of the same scene and the other images have different counts of the flying objects: one image has four, another five...
This area is on route to the airports in Queens, but I also took images of this same scene with airplanes in them and you can clearly see the planes' lights and wings. These flying objects have none of those features.
Also, why would that many airplanes be flying so close to each other?
This area is
Qiana
Blue Universe
Seekers, through science and imagination, have edeavored to look out. Studying our planet, our solar system, galaxies beyond ours, and even to the end or maybe just the beginning of space itself. Searching for the why things are the way they are, how did we become, and hoping to find more than our self.
Underlying the search is a question of purpose in our existence and
relationship versus separation and aloneness.
Pamela Becker & Tony Michaels
From a series of imagined sightings in my travels. Or is it?
Deborah
Simple sketch in black ink on my steno.
If some other intelligent creature is out there, I'm sure they want to find us just as much as we want to find them. Both civilizations building bigger and better tools just to say "Hi". Unfortunately, up until this point, each of us seem to be shrouded in darkness.
Zach
sky and earth, they are out there but we are down here not seeing, looking in not up.
Jim
death star-are the stars in the universe
our past? skulls from ancestors? or reminders of the future?
Jim
Comments [1]
This is my favorite from all the entries. It reminds me of a Dr Suess story where he talks about
a "Speck of dust, on a speck of dust, on a speck of dust."
That's where we are in the universe.
Look up at the stars at night and wave. Someone up there is waving back.
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