Sunday 24 September 2006

You are really really tiny.

So, just in case you thought you were anything remotely important, check out this photograph of Earth, taken by Voyager 1 in 1990. Earth is inside the blue circle.

"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. ... 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."
- Carl Sagan, from his book "Pale Blue Dot; a vision of the human future in space".
Nothing new, of course. Striking, nonetheless.

1 comment:

lusi said...

wow - thatt is a real putting-it-into-persepective kind of thang hey!