I was just re-reading my blog entry and looking at those images which I’ve been thinking about printing. I suddenly realised what has been the subliminal influence underpinning the way I want to make those images look. Here again is one of my images…
… and here is an image which I’d printed and stuck in my sketchbook a while back…
This sketchbook image is a photograph from the Rosetta Space mission of Comet 67P. It is also stored on my computer in a folder called “Modern Miracles” and represents the miracle which was the landing of the Philae lander on Comet 67P as part of the historic Rosetta mission in 2015. These miraculous events involved the Rosetta spacecraft traveling into deep space for 10 years to reach Comet 67P (a distance more than five times Earth’s distance from the Sun), and flying alongside the comet at exactly the right speed and trajectory to dispatch the Philae lander and land it on the surface of that massive rock hurtling through space. This extraordinary technological feat created an opportunity for Philae’s instruments to send back information and images from the surface of the comet and provide us with information about what it is made of.
Earlier studies have shown that comets contain complex organic molecules – compounds that are rich in carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen – the elements which make up nucleic acids and amino acids, the essential ingredients for life as we know it. However, it still seems incomprehensible to me how life can be created from a bare rock . As Richard Dawkins says, the creation of life is so improbable that it seems almost impossible; an occurence that might happen only once in a universe.
