A Matter of Perspective...

[JFN1]

I was cleaning up my hard drive and came across a quote I had stored, and a photo, both presented by Carl Sagan during a speech he gave some years ago, in the 1990's, I think.

With all of the trouble we are having as a nation, and as a species, I thought this quote and picture really put things in perspective.

Mr. Sagan's words:

"We succeeded in taking that picture , and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every 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 in 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 the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. 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. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, 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 and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."

It truly makes the manner in which the human race is struggling with itself right now seem so, well, childish, when the larger reality of our species' place in the universe, is thrust so dramatically into one's consciousness.

A picture of our world, taken from less than 6 light-hours distance, in a galaxy 100,000 light years across...

One little blue dot in the mind-boggling vastness of space...

Remember the universe. It could care less about our problems, it is true. Perhaps that is why we stay oblivious to it, most of the time...

[truedelphi]

1. It's sorta scary - Out a the billion and billion star clusters in

The universe - you and I have to be living on the one planet ruled by a mad man

Makes you wish for one of those alien life forms in Independence Day to come in and swoosh down on the White House (Earth Leader, we are the Universe Rulers; You have 72 hours to figure out how to be a real man. otherwise you are to become ashes and toe nail clippings!)

[JFN1]

2. Smart aliens

would just wait for Bush to kill the rest of us off, then scoop up the real estate...