Our pale blue dot
 

I recently finished reading this book by Carl Sagan, Our Pale Blue Dot. Below is an exurpt from the book. It kinda opens your eyes a lil bit more to whats out there.




http://images.jsc.nasa.gov/images/pao/AS11/10075246.jpg





... Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician,every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there - on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors, so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

What an interesting perspecitve. On one level it is quite deep, yet on another level, so simple.

Thank you for sharing.

It really makes you think. Sometimes when I look at the moon or the sky and think about stuff, I kinda get in awe that I am actually alive.

It's an interesting book. It's deep, real deep. It's also written simple enough for the average Joe to comprehend.


Glad some of you liked it.....

That's actually really intriguing... I tend to be stubborn in my thoughts, so it's nice when someone shares another perspective.

* No comment *



;) ;)

Wisdom from the Warners
 

I'm probably dating myself by posting this, but here's some words of wisdom from Yakko, Wakko and Dot Warner:

Everybody lives on a street in a city
Or a village or a town for what it's worth.
And they're all inside a country which is part of a continent
That sits upon a planet known as Earth.

And the Earth is a ball full of oceans and some mountains
Which is out there spinning silently in space.
And living on that Earth are the plants and the animals
And also the entire human race.

It's a great big universe
And we're all really puny
We're just tiny little specks
About the size of Mickey Rooney.
It's big and black and inky
And we are small and dinky
It's a big universe and we're not.

I think its cool how Dr. Sagan spent years trying to convince NASA and the JPL of turning the Voyager camera around to face the earth when it was past the orbit of Pluto. He finally did and it was amazing. He wanted to show the people of Earth how small and fragile we were in the context of space. From that far out... All of our being, is nothign but a plae blue dot. What a visionary.

Ah yes, but with that comes the theory of other pale blue dots? We exist in this "solar system" why can't there be another planet just like ours.?

Do any of you think there are truly other life forms out there? That maybe, just maybe there is another planet that is very similar to ours?