“I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.”
It was these two sentences from Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick” that captured the heart of the great Carl Sagan. It is this romance with the unknown that triggered and emboldened mankind’s exploration into space, and it is the heart of Swedish animator and digital artist Erik Wernquist’s new short film, “Wanderers.”
Combining breathtaking visuals of realistic depictions of a variety of places in our solar system — kindly detailed by Wernquist here — with the ever-mind-expanding words of Carl Sagan, pulled from an audio recording of his book “Pale Blue Dot,” Wernquist tempts readers to wonder what lies beyond our atmosphere and visualizes what it would be like if humanity happened to make that journey in the future. Take four minutes out of your day and be inspired by the exceptional creation above.