EMAIL: mallekai@postgres.berkeley.edu
NAME: Mark Lin
TOPIC: Science Fiction
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
RENDERER USED: Povray 3.0
TOOLS USED: Povray 3.0, dxf2pov
RENDER TIME: 1 min 26 sec.
HARDWARE USED: Sun UltraCreator3D
IMAGE DESCRIPTION: I call my image "Earth...take a last look". 
Last night I was watching the Simpsons Halloween special, and
they were showing the episode where Lisa was creating a science
experiment by growing a small colony of tiny blue alien species 
(by accient) inside a small petri dish. This small colony of
alien species evolved very rapidly, until eventually they grew
aware that their creator (and therefore their God) was Lisa.

Anyways, after watching this Simpsons episode, it made me think
how maybe, the human race is also just a sample of a small colony 
in an experimental petri dish we call Earth. And the Earth is only 
one tiny sample of a particle of dust in what we call the Universe.
And whoever (or whatever) is "experimenting" on us, we can never
predict, because there is an infinite number of possiblities that
not even science itself can predict (maybe the whole experiment
was started by accident, like in the Simpsons episode).

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: I used dxf2pov to
convert two dxf models I got from the internet. One was a
model of a hand, and another was a model of a skull. For the
textures used on the earth, I used some examples taken from
the Povray tutorial. And finally, for the star field, I
took the imagemap used for "Two dolphins by night" in the
Povray CDROM.