Everything from a distance

[Rick336]

Photo of Earth taken from Voyager 1 - 1990


"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 "superstar," every "supreme leader," 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. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. 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."


- Carl Sagan 1990





Rick

[Jennifer5]

Interesting article. Thanks for sharing.

[offog]

Great item! I've always loved astronomy. I'm sure there's other life somewhere in the universe. Our galaxy has billions of stars. The latest estimate says that the universe has a trillion galaxies. Hey, somebody must be home out there!

[Rick336]

Originally Posted by offog

Great item! I've always loved astronomy. I'm sure there's other life somewhere in the universe. Our galaxy has billions of stars. The latest estimate says that the universe has a trillion galaxies. Hey, somebody must be home out there!

Yep. We're basically tiny microorganisms living on an insignificant speck of dust floating through space. If there is other intelligent life in the universe, chances are nobody knows we're here.

In 1977 the USA launched Voyager 1 into space with a message to any intelligent life form that may find it. The message from President Carter from June 17, 1977 says:

"We cast this message into the cosmos… Of the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, some — perhaps many — may have inhabited planets and space faring civilizations. If one such civilization intercepts Voyager and can understand these recorded contents, here is our message:

We are trying to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope some day, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of Galactic Civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination and our goodwill in a vast and awesome universe."

The photo of earth above was taken by Voyager 1 in 1990. That was 19 years ago. Since then Voyager has traveled beyond our own solar system and is now headed deep into the blackness of outer space like a message in a bottle saying, "We are trying to survive.."

By the time Voyager finally reaches the closest star, this post will have been written 30,000 years in the past and any trace of my existence on this planet will have long vanished over thousands of millennium.


http://www.bottlenose.demon.co.uk/galactic/galaxy.jpg


Rick