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Tuesday, April 28, 2015

Cosmos and The Pale Blue Dot

Monday, April 27, 2015. University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada" "Astrophysicists draw most comprehensive map of the universe"

The image below is from Neil deGrasse Tyson's re-telling of Carl Sagan's Cosmos; on the cosmic 12-month calendar since the Big Bang, "All of recorded history occupies only the last 14 seconds..." --

Yeah, there, in the month of December exists our teeny tiny humanoid beginnings.




















On October 13, 1994, the famous astronomer Carl Sagan was delivering a public lecture at his own university of Cornell. During that lecture, he presented this photo:




"We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every 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.
....
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. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, 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 and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known— Carl Sagan, speech at Cornell University, October 13, 1994