A new animation by London artist Andrew Khosravani illustrates a lecture given by Carl Sagan at the Royal Institution in 1977.

Sagan highlights the importance and endless opportunities that comes with space exploration. He makes the point that we are an inquisitive species and that our curiosity is a huge part of our success. Now that we have explored our world, he says, it is time to “examine our surroundings of space”. This lecture from 1977 is still, or even more relevant as we look to send people to Mars and beyond.

The animation was created as part of the Royal Institution’s online advent calendar A Place Called Space. Each day in the run up to Christmas a new piece of content will be unveiled. The multimedia content will range from animations, illustrations, articles, video content and poetry, all exploring space travel as a human experience and analysing its role within our culture today.

Carl Sagan was an American astronomer, cosmologist, astrophysicist and astrobiologist. He also assembled the first physical messages which were sent into space, that were intended to be potentially understood by extraterrestrial intelligence.

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