Monday, February 28, 2011

Me Spacey? Nah...


This is the Earth as it looked from Voyager 1 twenty years ago.  Carl Sagan said:
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 ourselvese    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.


3 comments:

Anonymous said...

WOW..Eric, if that posting is all your own thoughts on 'Life' it's very disquieting! it's wonderful in it's content but to think that there is no other 'help' for us Earthbeings hmmm, of course I believe in God and so my thoughts don't go any further than that..HE has HIS plans and who am I to wonder why we are here..(off my soap box now) Lovely to read though.

Norma.x

Emily said...

Puts our silly gripes and worries in perspective, doesn't it?

Boilerdad said...

I had followed the Voyager I as soon as I could when the WWW was born. The entire idea is still fascinating to me. When I saw this picture for the first time, I was about 27, just married, and really didn't understand the breadth of it; does space REALLY never end? Now with offspring, and a little wiser this picture along with the narrative puts into a perspective I think I can get my mind around. Carl Sagan, well put my fellow earthling.

P.S. I still check in every now and then at voyager.jpl.nasa.gov.