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A sense of wonder...
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| Omega_M |
Can you see the tiny white dot in this picture ? That's the Earth.
It is a photo that was taken by the space probe Voyager 1 on February 14, 1990. As the spacecraft left our neighborhood for the outer fringes of the solar system, engineers turned it around for one last look back at its home planet. The camera was about 6.4 billion kilometers (4 billion miles,) away from Earth when it captured and sent back this lonely portrait of our world (Caught in the center of scattered light rays, a result of taking the picture so close to the Sun), Earth appears as a tiny point of light, a crescent only 0.12 pixel in size.
Carl Sagan wrote beautifully on the significance of that tiny image:
| quote: | 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. |
I thought that was nice. :) I believe Voyager 1 is now at a distance of about 100 AU ( equivalent to 100 times the distance between the Earth and Sun) and well into outer space. |
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| Mr. Pink |
I read that whole book, the pale blue dot....
very eye opening.
you should all check it out :) |
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| zokissima |
| Very humbling. Really makes you think twice about our position in life, and the endless arrogance that is sweeping the world. |
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| stren |
| quote: | Originally posted by Mr. Pink
I read that whole book, the pale blue dot....
very eye opening.
you should all check it out :) |
title? |
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| Omega_M |
| quote: | Originally posted by stren
title? |
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| Mr. Pink |
Yeah, it's a REALLY great book.
kind of made me want to sing by the fire and play guitar with all of my fellow human beings :D |
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| AirPole |
Nice quote from C. Sagan. It's really, really weird when you think about it. That little dot. It appears as any other star that we see when we look up at the sky at night, yet there are so many things happening on that little dot. I have thought about this so very, very much, especially in the summer when I was watching the stars and yet my conclusion has to be that I still can not fathom it. I can't. Everytime I think I can I'm wrong.
It's incredible. To us, this planet feels like a very big place, which is completely logical and rational. Then if you see a picture like that, you know you're wrong, really.
I will never stop thinking about this. Very good thread :) |
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| tubularbills |
| i remember following the voyager backn in the 90s when the images continued to come out. Neptune was amazing looking. |
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| Omega_M |
and on a more serious note, http://paledotprovesgod.ytmnd.com/
A believer's take on the tiny blue dot. An antithesis of the link you provided. Watch it to the end. Equally good. :) |
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| KilldaDJ |
cool.
the universe is in a word, massive. earth is smaller than a full stop, scary stuff. :nervous: |
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