A Glorious Mash-up

I know that this video is making the rounds on the web, and so readers may have seen it before, but I still think it’s worthwhile to post here. My research has led to several potential authors for the video and song, but I think the real artist behind it is someone named Colorpulse who used something called autotune to turn Carl Sagan’s spoken word into an only slightly robotic sounding singing voice. The result, once you get past the awkward start, is a hauntingly beautiful song that contains a reminder from beyond the grave to look up and wonder.

Sagan lived through some amazing times, and saw our understanding of the universe expand a thousand-fold. We need his voice now more than ever because we are indeed standing on that shore of space, but in our time are poised to turn our backs on it.

Lyrics:

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch

You must first invent the universe

Space is filled with a network of wormholes

You might emerge somewhere else in space

Some when-else in time

The sky calls to us

If we do not destroy ourselves

We will one day venture to the stars

A still more glorious dawn awaits

Not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise

A morning filled with 400 billion suns

The rising of the milky way

The Cosmos is full beyond measure of elegant truths

Of exquisite interrelationships

Of the awesome machinery of nature

I believe our future depends powerfully

On how well we understand this cosmos

In which we float like a mote of dust

In the morning sky

But the brain does much more than just recollect

It inter-compares, it synthesizes, it analyzes

it generates abstractions

The simplest thought like the concept of the number one

Has an elaborate logical underpinning

The brain has it’s own language

For testing the structure and consistency of the world

[Hawking]

For thousands of years

People have wondered about the universe

Did it stretch out forever

Or was there a limit

From the big bang to black holes

From dark matter to a possible big crunch

Our image of the universe today

Is full of strange sounding ideas

How lucky we are to live in this time

The first moment in human history

When we are in fact visiting other worlds

The surface of the earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean

Recently we’ve waded a little way out

And the water seems inviting