[IP] some perspective

[Dave Farber <dave@farber.net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: "Louis A. Mamakos" <louie@TransSys.COM>
Date: Tue, 25 Mar 2003 09:20:21 -0500
To: dave@farber.net
Subject: some perspective


In these times, I think of some remarks that Carl Sagan made in 1996
on our place in the universe, and an image of the Earth taken by the
Voyager 1 spacecraft from 4 billion miles away.

http://www.seds.org/billa/psc/pbd.html
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA00452

Let's get some perspective.

Louis Mamakos

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    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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