Friday, May 09, 2008

There We Are






Once I was searching for the photo of the earth from the space or from the moon that I found this photo in the posts by Gavin Alexander.

http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/gavinalexander/entry/untitled_entry/
http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/gavinalexander/entry/the_pale_blue/

In the photo you can see a pale dot indicated by the arrow. This is earth!!
What do feel by looking at this tiny tiny dot which is the all world to us?

Carl Sagan in his book, The pale blue dot, expressed his feeling toward this photo. I don’t think it could be said any better.

The Youtube video is the part of his book by his own voice. Here is the part of the text. It’s amazing…

"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."

3 comments:

Frieda said...

it was wonderful to read this post.. We are all a delicate matter ..too bad we have not find a way to get along in this world.

Anonymous said...

Why does earth show up so visibly? And why can't we see the sun when it's something like ten million times more luminescent than the earth?

Hiva said...

Well, I can refer you to this link from the Wikipedia. there you can find a photo which shows the approximate location of the Voyager 1 while taking this photograph. Actuallty you can see the sunlight beams in the photo. One of them pass through the earth.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Blue_Dot