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Re: Pale Blue Dot
wow.
_________________ In the absence of God, I found Man. -Guillermo Del Torro
Have you tried that? Looking for answers? Or have you been content to be terrified of a thing you know nothing about?
Are you pushing your own short comings on us and safely hating them from a distance?
Is this the virtue of faith? To never change your mind: especially when you should?
Young Earth Creationists take offense at the idea that we have a common heritage with other animals. Why is being the descendant of a mud golem any better?
Confidence being an expectation built on past experience, evidence and extrapolation to the future. Faith being an expectation held in defiance of past experience and evidence.
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Re: Pale Blue Dot
To put this in perspective, this is a real image taken just a couple of days ago by the Cassini spacecraft which was launched in 1997 and is now orbiting Saturn. This photo shows our humble planet as it appears from about 900 million miles away! How small and insignificant we are in the grand scheme of things and, yet, how fragile and special we are too.
_________________ -Geo Question everything
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Re: Pale Blue Dot
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 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. 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.
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.”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
The following user would like to thank Chris OConnor for this post: geo
Joined: Mar 2009 Posts: 3564 Location: Michigan
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Re: Pale Blue Dot
_________________ In the absence of God, I found Man. -Guillermo Del Torro
Have you tried that? Looking for answers? Or have you been content to be terrified of a thing you know nothing about?
Are you pushing your own short comings on us and safely hating them from a distance?
Is this the virtue of faith? To never change your mind: especially when you should?
Young Earth Creationists take offense at the idea that we have a common heritage with other animals. Why is being the descendant of a mud golem any better?
Confidence being an expectation built on past experience, evidence and extrapolation to the future. Faith being an expectation held in defiance of past experience and evidence.
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Re: Pale Blue Dot
Such eloquence. Carl Sagan - the ultimate agitator. He didn't need to say it directly, "it" was an inescapable conclusion to his observations. He convinced me way back when we read Demon Haunted World.
The following user would like to thank LanDroid for this post: geo
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