"Sam" (samwellington)
06/25/2016 at 06:00 • Filed to: None
11
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"Sam" (samwellington)
06/25/2016 at 06:00 • Filed to: None | 11
| 8 |
For those of you with tiny monitors -
“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 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. 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.
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.”
And a video if you’re allergic to reading -
Clemsie McKenzie
> Sam
06/25/2016 at 06:09 |
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My thoughts exactly. Also, insta-friend for posting some Carl Sagan here!
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Sam
> Clemsie McKenzie
06/25/2016 at 06:12 |
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I just watched the last episode of the new Cosmos where they play the quote while zooming out.
Twingo Tamer - About to descend into project car hell.
> Sam
06/25/2016 at 06:41 |
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Someone started chopping loads of onions the first time I heard that speech.
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Clemsie McKenzie
> Sam
06/25/2016 at 06:47 |
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Still haven’t finished the new Cosmos! I should get to it, it’s really well made.
PS9
> Sam
06/25/2016 at 09:14 |
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Existence at all is such a frail and vanishingly short thing. To be a lifeform is to embody vulnerability itself; a glass sphere in a room full of runaway bullets and supersonic debris.
Considering the many, many, many ways the world and even the universe has to totally unravel the complexity of life in brutal unforgiving detail, existence continued is a precious gift. And that sentience and intelligence can be had on top of all that is nothing short of miraculous. Considering the multitudes of biological machinery required for consciousness, it's not a surprise at all that it did not appear on this planet until after ~4 and a half billion years of trial and error.
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Sam
> PS9
06/25/2016 at 12:31 |
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Just think how lucky everything fell into place just for life to be on Earth. The Earth has enough mass for a magnetosphere, but not too much that we become Venus. The Earth gained water, likely from a comet, the same one that probably brought life here in the first place. The Earth is just far enough from the Sun to be cool, but just close enough to warm.
Most of these are reasons that living on Mars is stupid. It’s ludicrously cold, there’s no oxygen, it has no magnetosphere which means the cosmic rays will give you super-cancer, and building anything will require an astonishing amount of stuff to load in a rocket.
Gotta cherish what we have here, ya know?
AMGtech - now with more recalls!
> Sam
06/25/2016 at 12:42 |
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Interlude on Story of the Year’s “The Black Swan”
xyzabc
> Sam
07/12/2016 at 09:14 |
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Once you’ve lived a little and experience things, you realize the World is really a small town.