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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