This is the release version of the album I've been working on for the last three months of my life. Thank you to all my listeners for your support and I hope you enjoy this version, which has been professionally mastered.

The bandcamp version comes with a 20 page colour digital booklet featuring many of the cosmological structures the album focuses on:
https://marcdauncey.bandcamp.com/album/cosmos

"The album is a darkly satirical look at humanity’s relationship with the cosmos. Looking into the near future where human beings mine asteroids for precious metals with all the attendant exploitation present in terra-based industries today. We start from the sun and move outwards. 

Heavy Metal Rain On Venus is stark warning on the consequences of climate change on earth, presenting a literal hellscape of molten metal raining on the scorched plains. 

Next we view Earth through alien eyes recieving the scrambled &  babbling radio signals we’ve been emitting for over a century, before moving on through the solar system taking in comets, asteroids and moons of Saturn and Jupiter. 

The album then leaves the solar system with Voyager 2, takes us to the deepest darkest interstellar voids before leaving us standing on the shore of an alien planet buzzing with life.

I wanted to base each piece on my emotional reaction to the location in question, which turns out to be a mixture of awe and even fear. These are after all, huge natural forces the scope of which is so much larger that our tiny lives. So when I think about places like the bootes void, millions of light years of nothing, I try to imagine what it would be like to be in the middle of that, just for a split second. A place so alien, dark and cold that it defies any human experience. It is that strangeness and mystery that I wanted to capture in my music. We are made of the same stuff as all of these structures. The universe exists within and without us.

I'm influenced by so many great musicians who've addressed this subject matter in the past. Eno & Tangerine Dream spring instantly to mind. But also nineties ambient like the sadly missed Pete Namlook, Monolake, modern classical composers like Max RIchter, Philip Glass and even drone rockers like Sun o:))). I was watching Star Trek alongside producing these and that is also a huge influence. I hope you enjoy listening to these songs."

Buy On Bandcamp

Marc Dauncey - Cosmos LP (release version)

Comet Hyakutake (Japanese pronunciation: [çakɯ̥take], formally designated C/1996 B2) is a comet, discovered on 31 January 1996,[1] that passed very close to Earth in March of that year. It was dubbed The Great Comet of 1996; its passage near the Earth was one of the closest cometary approaches of the previous 200 years. Hyakutake appeared very bright in the night sky and was widely seen around the world. The comet temporarily upstaged the much anticipated Comet Hale–Bopp, which was approaching the inner Solar System at the time.

Scientific observations of the comet led to several discoveries. Most surprising to cometary scientists was the first discovery of X-ray emission from a comet, believed to have been caused by ionised solar wind particles interacting with neutral atoms in the coma of the comet. The Ulysses spacecraft unexpectedly crossed the comet's tail at a distance of more than 500 million km (3.3 AU; 310 million mi) from the nucleus, showing that Hyakutake had the longest tail known for a comet.

Hyakutake is a long-period comet. Before its most recent passage through the Solar System, its orbital period was about 17,000 years, but the gravitational perturbation of the giant planets has increased this period to 70,000 years

Hyakutake

Heavy Metal Rain On Venus (Atomic Weight Breakbeat Mix)

In astronomy and astrobiology, the circumstellar habitable zone (CHZ or sometimes "ecosphere", "liquid-water belt", "HZ", "life zone" or "Goldilocks zone") is the region around a star where a planet with sufficient atmospheric pressure can maintain liquid water on its surface.

In November 2013, astronomers reported, based on Kepler space mission data, that there could be as many as 40 billion Earth-sized planets orbiting in the habitable zones of Sun-like stars and red dwarfs in the Milky Way, 11 billion of which may be orbiting Sun-like stars. In 2021 scientists published estimates of the occurrence rates of rocky habitable zone planets around Sun-like stars with updated data and criteria related to stellar effective temperature for habitable zones – including ∼4 such exoplanets around G and K dwarf stars within 10 pc of the Sun, ~300 million in the Milky Way and an average distance of the nearest HZ planet around G and K dwarfs about 6 pc.

Life On Exoplanets Part I

Strangely calming considering I literally sampled a pneumatic drill

Mining The Asteroid Belt Part II

Earth

Heavy Metal Rain On Venus (Ansound Rework)

A dead body on Earth would begin to decompose as the bacteria in the air and within the body began the long process of breaking down. However, in space, there is no oxidation, so decomposition cannot occur before the body either freezes (if you are not near a source of heat) or mummifies (all the moisture will be sucked out of your body). If your body was mummified, all biological processes would stop rather quickly, so there would be no further breakdown of your body. Both processes happen rapidly, but that frozen/mummified corpse could potentially sail through the cosmos for millions of years before encountering another object or force that acted on it.

Desiccated Corpse Floating Through Space

Still a work in progress but here is an extended 5 minute version of Dawn On Europa. I'm combining influences from industrial bands like Nurse With Wound and drone rock like Sunn :0)))

Day time on Europa:

"The data show that midday temperatures at Europa's equator reach about -225 degrees Fahrenheit (130 degrees Kelvin). The surface is even colder toward the poles and before or after midday. Small patches of different colors on Europa's disk show regions that are warmer or cooler than their immediate surroundings: the warm patches are generally relatively dark, and thus absorb more sunlight, than neighboring regions, while the cool patches are relatively bright. In the lower left corner, heat radiation from Jupiter itself, can be seen peeking out from behind Europa's disk."

Dawn On Europa (Petrochemical Ocean Album Version)

Avi Loeb is no stranger to controversy. The prolific Harvard University astrophysicist has produced pioneering and provocative research on black holes, gamma-ray bursts, the early universe and other standard topics of his field. But for more than a decade he has also courted a more contentious subject—namely, space aliens, including how to find them. Until relatively recently, Loeb’s most high-profile work in that regard was his involvement with Breakthrough Starshot, a project funded by Silicon Valley billionaire Yuri Milner to send laser-boosted, gossamer-thin mirrorlike spacecraft called “light sails” on high-speed voyages to nearby stars. All that began to change in late 2017, however, when astronomers around the world scrambled to study an enigmatic interstellar visitor—the first ever seen—that briefly came within range of their telescopes.

The object’s discoverers dubbed it ‘Oumuamua—a Hawaiian term that roughly translates to “scout.” The unavoidably cursory examinations of this celestial passerby showed it had several properties that defied easy natural explanation. ‘Oumuamua’s apparent shape—which was like a 100-meter-long cigar or pancake—did not closely resemble any known asteroid or comet. Neither did its brightness, which revealed ‘Oumuamua was at least 10 times more reflective than one of our solar system’s typical space rocks—shiny enough to suggest the gleam of burnished metal. Most strangely, as it zoomed off after swooping by the sun, the object sped up faster than could be explained by our star’s waning gravitational grip alone. Run-of-the-mill comets can exhibit similar accelerations because of the rocketlike effect of evaporating gases jetting from their sunlight-warmed icy surfaces. But no signs of such jets were seen around ‘Oumuamua.

To Loeb, the most plausible explanation was as obvious as it was sensational: taken together with its possibly pancakelike shape and high reflectivity, ‘Oumuamua’s anomalous acceleration made perfect sense if the object was in fact a light sail—perhaps a derelict from some long-expired galactic culture. Primed by years spent pondering how we might someday find evidence of cosmic civilizations in the sky’s depths, he became increasingly convinced that, with ‘Oumuamua, the evidence had instead found us. In late 2018 Loeb and his co-author Shmuel Bialy, a Harvard postdoctoral fellow, published a paper in the Astrophysical Journal Letters arguing that ‘Oumuamua had been nothing less than humanity’s first contact with an artifact of extraterrestrial intelligence.

The paper has been a smash hit with journalists but has fallen flat with most of Loeb’s astrobiology-focused peers, who insist that, while strange, ‘Oumuamua’s properties still place it well within the realm of natural phenomena. To claim otherwise, Loeb’s critics say, is cavalier at best and destructive at worst for the long struggle to remove the stigma of credulous UFO and alien-abduction reports from what should unquestionably be a legitimate field of scientific inquiry.

The observations suggest this unusual object had been wandering through the Milky Way, unattached to any star system, for hundreds of millions of years before its chance encounter with our star system.

“For decades we’ve theorized that such interstellar objects are out there, and now―for the first time―we have direct evidence they exist,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington, in November 2017.

Immediately after its discovery, telescopes around the world, including ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile, were called into action to measure the object’s orbit, brightness and color. Urgency for viewing from ground-based telescopes was vital to get the best data.

Oumuamua (First Contact Album Version)

Saturn’s moon Enceladus is famous for the huge water-vapor geysers at its south pole, which are thought to originate from a global ocean deep beneath the moon’s outer ice crust. At this moon’s south pole, water is seen to comes up to the surface through giant cracks in the ice called tiger stripes. As the water vapor re-freezes in Enceladus’ extremely tenuous atmosphere, it forms ice particles that fall back down and coat the moon’s south polar region with fresh ice.

The Oceans Of Enceladus (Space Geyser Album Version)

Mining The Asteriod Belt (Breaking Rocks Album Version)

Before the Voyager missions, scientists predicted that the solar bubble just sort of dissolved into interstellar space as you ventured farther and farther from the sun. Voyager 2 seems to confirm that “in fact, there’s a very very sharp boundary there,” says Donald Gurnett of the University of Iowa, the lead author of this paper. Voyager 2’s plasma wave instrument ended up measuring plasma densities that were very much on par with what Voyager 1 detected. Because solar plasma is so hot (about 1 million °C), and interstellar plasma is incredibly cold (just 10,000 °C), the density of plasma jumps up by a factor between 20 and 50 as you cross the border. “That’s a characteristic of fluids, which oftentimes form very sharp boundaries,” says Gurnett.

Voyager Leaves The Solar System (Slipping Into Darkness Album Version)

"The requirements for life on Earth, its elemental composition, and its environmental limits provide a way to assess the habitability of exoplanets. Temperature is key both because of its influence on liquid water and because it can be directly estimated from orbital and climate models of exoplanetary systems. Life can grow and reproduce at temperatures as low as −15 °C, and as high as 122 °C. Studies of life in extreme deserts show that on a dry world, even a small amount of rain, fog, snow, and even atmospheric humidity can be adequate for photosynthetic production producing a small but detectable microbial community. Life is able to use light at levels less than 10−5 of the solar flux at Earth. UV or ionizing radiation can be tolerated by many microorganisms at very high levels and is unlikely to be life limiting on an exoplanet. Biologically available nitrogen may limit habitability. Levels of O2 over a few percent on an exoplanet would be consistent with the presence of multicellular organisms and high levels of O2 on Earth-like worlds indicate oxygenic photosynthesis. Other factors such as pH and salinity are likely to vary and not limit life over an entire planet or moon."

Life On Exoplanets Part II

"The nature of void offers some interesting food for thought. Visitors to the area would surely feel overwhelmed by the isolation, with its extreme distances between galaxies and blacker-than-black view of distant space.

And as blogger Michael Anissimov has noted, the Boötes void is probably the most perfect vacuum in space, the implications of which are worth considering. Not only would objects like rocks and dust be exceptionally rare, but so too would particles. It might take eons, or possibly never, for particles to interact. 

The need for an explanation has given rise to a new theory, one which suggests that supervoids are caused by the intermingling of smaller ones. Aldring has noticed that galaxies inside of voids take the curious shape of a tubular structure — likely an important clue. In turn he suspects that the Boötes void is the result of smaller voids coming together, much like how soap bubbles coalesce to form a single large one. As for the tube of galaxies, that's likely the remnant of the boundary between the smaller voids. Those galaxies, speculates Aldring, are now stranded inside the supervoid.

There is another, albeit more radical possibility — and one that has likely not been considered in the scientific literature. The Boötes void could be the result of an expanding Kardashev III scale civilization. As the colonization bubble expands outward from its home system, the civilization dims each star (and subsequently each galaxy) it encounters by blanketing it in a Dyson shell. This might also explain why the void has such a nice, spherical shape. Given that the void is about 700 million light-years from Earth, and that intelligent life could have emerged in the Universe about 4 billion years ago, this ancient civilization may have had enough time to perform this astonishing feat of cosmological engineering. Now, this is pure speculation, but it's worth throwing it out there as a possibility given the strangeness of the phenomenon."