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The Pale Blue Dot
Topic Started: May 23 2009, 04:05 AM (257 Views)
ngc1514
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Something to think about this Memorial Day weekend as the United States finds itself in a never ending religious war.

While hunting down a song title on another forum, I was directed to a Youtube video of Carl Sagan and the pale blue dot. The musical background was Pink Floyd's "On the turning away."



The photo of the earth from 3.7 billion miles.
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That tiny dot is all we have and, possibly, all we ever will have.

Sagan's words:

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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.
Edited by ngc1514, May 23 2009, 04:07 AM.
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Science needs more like him who can communicate science and what's known of the universe, life, to all of us. Not many scientists are capable of it. Neil deGrasse Tyson perhaps. Richard Feynman to a degree.

His Cosmos series can be found here.
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ngc1514
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Let's not forget Stephen Jay Gould for biology and evolution! He was one of my favorites. One of the best books about the state of cosmology today comes from science writer, Timothy Ferris in The Whole Shebang: A State of the Universe(s) Report.

If geology is your interest, John McPhee's Annals of a Former World is a winner. The book is a trip across the United States approximately at the 40th parallel that describes the geology seen along I-40 and how it came to be. He makes the trip in the company of geologists who have lived, worked and loved the terrain being covered.

While not as accessible to the average reader as some others, someone who doesn't mind googling some of the concepts in the book will get a wonderful understanding of how the world we see today came to be. His description of both Wyoming (where more of earth's history can be seen from one location than anywhere else in the country) and David Love, the geologist who mapped most of it out is fascinating.

Love's family history in Wyoming is as interesting as the geology itself.

Well worth the time.

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We definitely need more like them. We have the media distorting science, as we saw with the discovery of Darwinius masillae, and we have Creationists and their simplified distortions, but too little real science so the average Joe on the street can grasp it.
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ngc1514
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It would be useful... if people evinced much of an interest in science. Unfortunately, and as shown on a lot of web pages, American Idol has a lot higher priority in the minds of average Joe than a fascination with the implications of quantum cosmology or evolutionary biology.

Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time was probably the least understood best seller (other than Ulysses by Joyce) ever to make the top of the NY Times list!
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