Cassini is the longest running, most expensive and far-flung art project in the history of the planet. Now Cassini is about to take its final plunge, almost exactly 20 years after it took off. Sure it's teaching us about gasses and moons and particles and all, but what it mainly brought back was art: images, close and precise, of formal bodies in space. Something we've been glimpsing and imagining since Galileo. Saturn's colors, shapes and rings turn out to be more formally perfect than we could imagine, and more sublimely beautiful.
Formality and beauty are also the lessons of the Eclipse: that the macrocosmos, glimpsed at its most formal and refined, is the definition of awe, and the definition of beauty. The intersection of human consciousness and the working of the universe-refined is awe. It forces our attention beyond the flat earth and the mundane to the larger scales we are operating under whether we notice or not.
I lived on the edge of SoHo for almost 20 years, and I was forever bugged and disappointed by the obsessiveness and meaningless expense of so much conceptual art presented in the galleries there. But consider this:
Conceived in the early-80s, Cassini cost almost $4 billion. It launched in 1997 and took 7 years to get to Saturn traveling at 42,000 mph. 2 billion miles, slingshotting around Venus, the Earth and Jupiter: 10 times the distance from Earth to the Sun. Around 80 light-minutes away: more than an hour for signals to get here, travelling at the speed of light. Entered Saturn orbit in 2004--expected to last 4 years, it's going on 13. All to send back a bunch of pretty pictures. The remarkable thing is that it's been worth it.
I was back at Cornell in 2008 and by chance saw these photos at the Johnson Art Museum.
"Spectacular Saturn: Images from the Cassini-Huygens Mission," the exhibition was called. An art museum, not a science museum. I had never seen anything like it. To me it was like pictures confirming a UFO, or life on other planets. The detail and the beauty, the technological accomplishment of sending a craft a billion miles to take perfectly clear photos and beam them back hi-def. They show Saturn to be perfect beyond our imagination: a platonic form, an ideal form.
The roundness of the planet. The flatness of the rings: they are actually two-dimensional by any earthly standards. Out there, in true space, something real can be this thin, this ethereal. Their actual thickness is about 30 feet, and the width of the rings is like the distance to the moon. If they were the thickness of paper they would be almost 2 miles around. The farther out you look, the more formal things become. Edge-on, they are virtually invisible.
These images changed my view of space, the way whale-watching changed my view of the earth. I bought the $40 book at the museum, and as soon as I got home I sent copies to my parents, my sisters, and my best friend: I thought it was that important. And now the book isn't even on Amazon?
When Cassini departed in 1997, the iPhone did not exist. Now the camera it carries is dwarfed by smartphones. Yet behold the magnificence. To the religious and the psychedelic communities I say: behold the mind of God. Made more magnificent when you consider the act of human ingenuity that obtained this secret distant beauty. Yet we ignore the message of space. And that's the definition of mundane.
Galileo was the first to see the planet was more than just round in 1620 when he invented the telescope. Cassini, the namesake of the satellite, with better optics 20 years later, perceived them to be rings. Could he have imagined this precise beauty? Four hundred years on, this we have accomplished. But can we imagine, in our world now, this commitment to science and art, and the best of mankind, untainted by greed or violence? What has changed since the 90s when 19 countries came together to embark on this project?
History (or perhaps archeology) will see this as one of mankind's greatest achievements. The best example of what humans can do. Publicly funded, collectively owned. An accomplishment of our species: for mystery, magnificence, knowledge and beauty. What else is there? Survival? Sure. Cash and greed? Why not.
The technologies that carried Cassini to Saturn for art-as-science are the same that created ICBMs, drones and Smart bombs--rockets of death. Here are two aspects of the world expressed. Pessimism v. optimism; fear and killing v. exploration and beauty. Out there, in the solar system, at the macro level, there is no one to fear or kill or menace. Look to Cassini, before it falls, for an exploration of what we are, what we can do, what's inside of us.
