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The Writer's Almanac from Tuesday, August 20, 2013
"The Old Flame" by Robert Lowell, from Collected Poems. © Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003.
ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2013
It was on this day in 1977 that Voyager 2 was launched by NASA to explore the planets of our solar system and to take the first up-close photographs of the giant planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.
Just before the Voyagers took off, a committee of scientists, led by Carl Sagan, decided to put on board each Voyager a message from Earth in case extraterrestrials ever found them. At the time, the Cold War was at its height, and some members of the committee considered that these spacecraft and their contents might be the last traces of the human race left in the universe after a nuclear war. The Voyagers were each equipped with a gold-plated phonograph containing a variety of earthly sounds, including a heartbeat, a mother's kiss, wind, rain, surf, a chimpanzee, footsteps, laughter, the music of Bach and Mozart, and the Chuck Berry song "Johnny Be Good." Carl Sagan said, "The launching of this bottle into the cosmic ocean says something very hopeful about life on this planet."
Today, the Voyagers have traveled farther from Earth than any other human-made objects in history. Both have gone well beyond Pluto, the farthest planet from the sun. Voyager 2, which launched on this day in 1977, is currently approaching the outer limits of our solar system, headed toward Sirius, the brightest star in the sky.
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It's the birthday of the gothic horror author H.P. [Howard Philips] Lovecraft, born in Providence, Rhode Island (1890). As a young man, he became a recluse, sleeping during the day and reading and writing at night. And for a long time, Lovecraft had little contact with the outside world, until it occurred to him that he could support himself as a writer.
At the time, most horror stories were about ghosts and vampires, but Lovecraft wrote about his fear of modern science. He believed that people like Albert Einstein were learning too much about the secrets of the universe, and that those secrets could destroy us. He began to write stories about scholars who accidentally stumble onto the horrible knowledge of lost, monstrous Gods.
He began to publish his stories in pulp magazines like Weird Tales and Astounding Stories. He never made much money from these stories, so he also worked as a ghostwriter, and among his clients was the escape artist Harry Houdini.
Lovecraft said, "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown."
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