A Painting from a Dying Flower

By | September 17, 2013

This is my favorite XKCD strip ever, and that is saying something:

Wow. Why do I feel so sad?

Somehow, the idea of the  bee image embedded in the orchid reminds me of this story, in which I raised the following question:

This makes me wonder…are there other past events that we might get a second shot at observing? If a well-placed dust cloud can bring back an event from nearly half a millennium ago, what other options might exist for retrieving visual information on events long since past?

In a similar vein, Stephen commented:

It makes me wonder if there isn’t a record of everything echoed somewhere if we just knew where to look.

Well, maybe not everything. But it’s encouraging that we can get a glimpse of a bee that, presumably, no human being ever got to see.  So much of the past is lost to us.

But not all of it.