Sept 11th as viewed from space

From: John W Burgeson (burgytwo@juno.com)
Date: Thu Sep 13 2001 - 10:27:49 EDT

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    Sept 11th as viewed from space

    The late Carl Sagan was not a Christian. But his words (below) ring clear
    none-the-less. They come from a NASA posting.

    Burgy
     
    Greetings from NASA HQ,

    Although I owe you a list of recent science results etc., following
    yesterday's events I don't have it in me. I thought that instead I would
    forward my favorite quote from Carl Sagan. My apologies to those of you
    who have read it before, especially if you don't like it.

    I don't by any means think that astronomy, or science, hold the answers
    to
    the world's problems. But I think Dr. Sagan got a lot of things right
    when
    he contemplated a picture of Earth, taken from our Voyager spacecraft in
    deep interplanetary space, and said:

    -------------------

    "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.

    "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 in 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 the dot on
    scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other
    corner of the dot. 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. 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."



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