the explorers journal - The Explorers Club

productions of time”—just as we know that those
very productions both defy and mirror eternity.
Some of the images reproduced here depict
vistas whose photons started their long journey
toward us well before Homo sapiens arose on
this miniscule mote of oxygenated, irrigated Earth.
Some predate the very formation of the Earth itself,
and the star about which it orbits, eventually to be
received by us—products of a garden yet unformed
at their journey’s start. It is slow glass indeed.
And there we end, at the beginning, a scene shimmering
through deep time and interstellar dust. The
interacting galaxies of an early universe, glowworms
of different colors, glint at the bottom of deep wells,
reflected in perfectly polished concave mirrors encased
within scrupulously machined tubes. This still
water serves to gather far-traveled interstellar photons
from time’s edge. The enlarging mirrors of our
telescopes comprise material forged at the centers
of the same generation of stars they now record.
Our gaze is irrevocably bound to the very fibers,
tendons, muscles, synapses, and cognitive glints
that would be impossible without the heavier
elements, alien to the early universe, smelted by
giant suns in time’s earliest epochs. And we—our
physical selves and our earliest incarnations all
the way back to the first bacterium—what did we
do Rooted in temporality, we still managed to
race ahead, like dolphins in a storm surge, intent
on exploding out of the wave to intercept rays of
archival starlight—fecund rays, alive with the DNA
of a universe.
b i o g r a p h y
A Fellow of The Explorers Club, Michael Benson
is a New York-based writer and filmmaker. He is
the author of Beyond: Visions of the Interplanetary
Probes and the recently released Far Out: A
Space-Time Chronicle.
D e e p - T i m e E x p o s u r e
The Hubble Ultra Deep Field is the deepest picture ever taken of the
universe in visible light; the image represents a cumulative exposure
time of more than 11 days. Among the 10,000 galaxies visible here
are those that formed within some 800 million years of the Big Bang.
These earliest galaxies can be seen as small red forms, some appearing
as mere dots. Image courtesy HST/NASA/ESA.
46