ABSTRACT
This chapter offers an eco-poetic/eco-critical reading of a group of films that appear to have no connection to environmentalism, and which are in every sense of the word experimental. The golden record designed by Carl Sagan captured public attention and a degree of controversy. James Blinn’s NASA animations of the Voyager space mission, coming at a particularly interesting moment in this history, are both experimental in their own right and accounts of an experiment in science and engineering in which the question of how the human can be extracted from the divine are particularly in play. To understand how this experiment contributes not only to space flight and space science but to the unfinished project of inventing the human, this chapter proposes to trace some of the missing theological genealogies of modern science. NASA’s almost permanent funding crises have consistently driven them to media spectacles.
