Pale Blue Dot

[Zest4Life]

After reading this text for the first time, I am filled with a sense of profound emotion that is difficult to put into words.

Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of Earth taken by the Voyager 1 space probe on February 14, 1990, from a distance of approximately 6 billion kilometers (search image on Google).

The following is excerpt from Carl Sagan's book Pale Blue Dot:

" 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. "

 

[An young being]

If you wish to be humbled more, here's the chance:

 

[Zest4Life]

@An young being The living organisms within our body don’t realize they’re inside a living being. It’s a frightening thought that we might actually be in the same exact situation.

[Yimpa]

25 minutes ago, An young being said:

If you wish to be humbled more, here's the chance:

 

Brilliant, I love how the arrows shrink as the video expands simultaneously.

[Parallax Mind]

@Zest4Life the earth isn't real. It's just scientific backstory. Just kidding, awesome exerpt dude. Sagan is the man. 

[An young being]

9 hours ago, Zest4Life said:

@An young being The living organisms within our body don’t realize they’re inside a living being. It’s a frightening thought that we might actually be in the same exact situation.

 

It may or may not be frightening, but it is certainly humbling.

[Kuba Powiertowski]

Little bit off topic - in Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy this Pale Blue Dot was described by Ford Prefect as „Mostly Harmless”😂 - I truly love it! It takes off all this unnecessary drama😉

[Breakingthewall]

In infinity there is no relativity, there is no big or small, there is only infinity. a subatomic particle is infinite, and so is a galaxy cluster. The entire universe is as infinite as a rat, since both contain the entirety of existence.