You keep using that word...

I do not think it means what you think it means.

The sky calls to us.

A still more glorious dawn awaits: not a sunrise, but a galaxyrise. A morning filled with four hundred billion suns: the rising of the Milky Way. The cosmos is full beyond measure: elegant truths, exquisite relationships and the awesome machinery of nature. We float like a mote of dust on the morning sky.

When I was a kid, Sagan was a guilty pleasure. I loved the guy but knew he was a big believer that the earth was billions and billions of years old, which obviously meant he didn't believe in God. Obviously I couldn't take his word for anything! (New readers: that's sarcasm. Check the archives). I still read his novel Contact, though, which was amazing. It contained all of the science/religion dichotomy of the movie it was made into, with one twist: it ends with a (fictional but possible) proof of God. The ending earned Carl some scorn in "legitimate" academic and scholarly circles and was cut from the movie, but it was his only way to resolve the amazing nature of the beauty he'd found in the universe. With such an amazing Creation, there must certainly be a Creator. Changing the ending changed the meaning of his book, but the movie was written and produced after his death.

And when viewed with that backstory, the autotuned video mashup takes on a whole new meaning.

The sky calls to us. A still more glorious dawn awaits.

You weren't wrong, Carl.