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Pale blue dot

chuboy

<- It was THIS big!
Voyager took this photograph of earth on completion of it's primary mission. The distance was 3.7 billion miles from Earth, really only just the other side of the backyard fence. Sagan ruminates on it below.

Just a little perspective for everyone this fine morn.

[img139]http://i28.*******.com/qyg4qs.png[/img139]

Carl Sagan said:
From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again 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.

And here's a link if you need to wrap your head around the scale of the universe.
 
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Jb

Tsun in the streets
thats pretty cool
 

Noheart

The Abysswalker
Ain't that the most righteous thing you ever did see?!
 

Mye

Someone has to win..
Lol...6 billion people crammed onto one tiny blue dot......sounds like a game of chinese twister....
 

Shimama

.the~desert~spirit.
^ That just blows my mind. It's really amazing when you imagine just how small our planet is and what a tiny part of the universe we are compared to the other fantastic things out there.

And I, for one, am a complete believer that Earth is not the only planet in the universe with life forms such as us humans on it. :)~
 

Mye

Someone has to win..
Lol...there has to be other life in the universe....otherwise the americans will run out of things to try and invade by the year 2079....
 

TomDraco

I'm a /tr/ainer.
Seen both of these enough to have them not make me go into "insignificant thought" mode.

Cool pics nonetheless.
 

P.M.

Poison Master
WOOOOW
Think about it.You're one small person on one of billions of planets(Probably more).
But you can still make a difference.Vote US REPUBLIC!
 
I edited the image to make it more accurate. My ego is now included. http://*******.com/r/wb3uiv/3

i c wut u did thar
 

Josiah

is your favorite
Lol...there has to be other life in the universe....otherwise the americans will run out of things to try and invade by the year 2079....
Hopefully you'll run out of crappy jokes. (You're next by the way).
 

Profesco

gone gently
[IMG139]http://i25.*******.com/6nuha8.gif[/IMG139]

Wah! @_@

That's a lot of insignificance to comprehend. Pretty amazing. Tonight might be a good night to lie on the roof and stare at the night sky and think long thoughts.
 

Indragon

Back in the USSR
Tonight might be a good night to lie on the roof and stare at the night sky and think long thoughts.

Profesco, I'd have thought you'd already done that :p

Yes, we are quite insignificant, but hey, might as well have fun while you live and be insignificant!
 

Gentleman

Sitting on Horsea
Since human conceit really only matters in the context of there being other humans around to use it on, I'm down with the wider universe being so much bigger than we can imagine.

Really, since we're so insignificant, we might as well go about our own business. I'm fairly sure it's what ants do, at any rate.

Besides any future plans humanity has for the tiny speck of the universe our speck is located in (hoping we get around to colonization someday), I'm not really concerned with what's going on bazillions of light years away. Call it a lack of perspective. :S
 

Sapphiredragon929

A r t i f i c e.
Not to disappoint or anything, but a pale blue dot does not mean we have to sob at how insignificant we are.

Our choices impact the people around us each day, and people on Earth are so powerful everyone can recognize them and *blahblahblah long boring speech*

Besides compare our bodies to the size of the earth and you get the same result so :/
 

GoombaGeek

Begone!!
WOOOOW
Think about it.You're one small person on one of billions of planets(Probably more).
But you can still make a difference.Vote US REPUBLIC!
When? The election is over, and I'm not American... and I'm underage... and I don't even support republicans...... >8( the shame of off-topic.

I've seen this before. Of course, Voyager is set to run out of plutonium in 2025, so everything will be dead and gone beyond New Horizons. Ain't it happycheerwonderful?
 
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