Michael Benson is an American documentary filmmaker (creator of the critically acclaimed “Predictions of Fire,” an exploration of the propaganda wellsprings of the recent Yugoslav wars) who, several years ago, found himself marooned, for reasons of the heart and presently of happy parenthood, in Ljubljana, Slovenia—whereupon he took to whiling away the lonesome hours by cruising the internet. Or rather, by delving through the rapidly growing, constantly expanding cyber archives of NASA and the Jet Propulsion Lab, the treasure troves of images beamed down by the two Voyager missions (literally hundreds of thousands of them) and the Mars Global Surveyor (six times that many) and all the other space probes (NEAR, Galileo, Pathfinder, Pioneer, and so forth). For months, Benson scoured these public websites, downloading particularly stunning “visions” prized by the space probes and creating his own collage of such marvels, which he then began sharing with others. With Lawrence Weschler, for example, with whom he’d first begun corresponding when Weschler was covering the Balkans for the New Yorker. And with Arthur C. Clarke, the great science-fiction master, whom Benson began visiting in Sri Lanka while working on one of his latest film project, a documentation, in part, of the world’s first zero-gravity theatrical experiment.

When Benson subsequently honed his collection of space-probe photographs into a single volume titled Beyond: Visions of the Interplanetary Probes (to be published later this month by Harry N. Abrams, Inc.), he invited Clarke to write a foreword, and Weschler to respond with an afterword. The texts that follow—almost a debate on the true significance of such imagery—are in turn adapted from those pieces.

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TOMORROW’S EXPLORERS
Arthur C. Clarke

When Michael Benson first came to see me in my home in Colombo, Sri Lanka, in December of 2001, he asked me about a theme that has reappeared throughout my work—that our species is in its childhood and that a next step of evolution has arrived with space travel. Why hadn’t the promise of that little film that Stanley Kubrick and I put together in the sixties, 2001: A Space Odyssey, been fulfilled? Michael quoted something I had written at that time:

Only the creatures who dared to move from the sea to the hostile, alien land were able to develop intelligence. Now that this intelligence is about to face a still greater challenge, it may be that this beautiful Earth of ours is no more than a brief resting place between the sea of salt and the sea of stars. Now we must venture forth.

I shared his sense of disappointment with the progress that has been achieved. When...