Against Cosmic Melancholia

On September 5, 1977, Voyager 1, built by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, was launched from Cape Canaveral atop a Titan IIIE rocket. It’s still going, almost forty-seven years later and some 15 billion miles away: humanity’s “most distant emissary,” as a British writer recently put it, continuing its mission “to boldly go” where no human artifact has gone before (to vary the most famous split infinitive in television history).  Read Full Article »