History of Human Civilization 4

A 43-Year Quest Following the Map of the Stars-A Tribute to Rapen-Gluck and Carl Sagan

To me, Lascaux remains a memory of a cold shock from 1983. To my eyes as a middle school student, those bulls were not mere drawings. They were a massive explosion of energy and a signal sent by an unknown universe. Yet my limited knowledge at the time confined that wonder within the meager phrase "primitive magic."

Years passed, and my quest to trace humanity's roots continued relentlessly, following the scorching geothermal heat of Africa and the timeless flow of the Nile. Then one day, through the paper of a scholar whose name was unfamiliar to me, I was reunited with those bulls I had sealed away in the depths of my unconscious.

Michael A. Rappenglk, a German paleoastronomer.

Using modern scientific simulations, he reconstructed the night sky of 17,000 years ago and proved that the bulls of Lascaux were, in fact, humanity's first star map-a condensation of the constellation Taurus onto the earth's surface. In that moment, the vague thrill the boy had felt in 1983, after 43 years, finally took on the name of "certainty."

When the intuition of the humanities lost its way and wandered, he held aloft the precise torch of science to restore humanity's lost night sky. Had it not been for the "commentaries on the stars" he deciphered from ivory carvings and cave paintings, the "genetic code of civilization" I propose might have remained nothing more than a hypothesis floating in the void.

And here stands another master at the final destination of my inquiry: Carl Sagan, who has already become a star yet continues to inspire me endlessly. He offered us the reflection of the "pale blue dot"-a perspective on our existence as specks of dust adrift in the vastness of the cosmos.

If Lappengluk helped us find humanity's "first gaze," condensed on a cave wall 17,000 years ago, Carl Sagan awakened us to the "ultimate coordinates" that gaze must reach. The small dots imprinted on the Lascaux bull painting and the pale blue dot captured by Voyager 1 ultimately hold the answer to the single genetic longing shared by all humanity: "Where did we come from, and where are we going?"

I offer my deepest respect to the dedication of Raphengluck, who has solitary tracked the stars through the vast darkness of history, and to the spirit of Carl Sagan, who made the vast universe humanity's own backyard.