me and my glorious distractions from immediate life stuff
cwnl:
Pale Blue Dots: Iconic Images of Earth From Space
Dozens of cameras circle Earth to document the planet in detail, but few ever afford whole views of our world.
The handful of rare glimpses have demonstrated that “Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena,” wrote the late Carl Sagan in Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space.
Robotic probes take most photos of Earth and the moon while en route to planets, asteroids, comets and even other star systems. But the practice of taking planetary self-portraits is almost never artistically motivated.
“We generally do it to calibrate instruments and check a spacecraft’s trajectory. If you point where you think the Earth is and see it, then you’re probably where you think you are,” said planetary scientist Mark Sykes of the Planetary Science Institute.
“But now, as we continue to find other planets, these general views help us look at the Earth in new ways,” Sykes said. “They help us ask, ‘What does a habitable planet look like? What indicates a civilization is there?’”
In this gallery Wired cover some of the most iconic images of our pale blue dot taken by both robots and humans.
Venus, Earth, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune as seen by Voyager as it passed the orbit of Pluto.
“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. … There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world.”
– Carl Sagan
from this distant vantage point, the earth might not seem of any particular interest.
but for us, it’s different.
consider again that pale blue dot.
that’s here. that’s home.
now look back at me.
ladies.
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Carl Sagan - You Are Here (Pale Blue Dot)
This has been in my iTunes for awhile, but I can’t remember where exactly it is from — I think SoundCloud. If anybody knows, I’ll be more than happy to give credit. Meanwhile, enjoy Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot speech with some piano thrown in. It’s beautiful.
It almost never feels like prejudice. Instead, it seems fitting and just—the idea that, because of an accident of birth, our group (whichever one it is) should have a central position in the social universe. Among Pharaonic princelings and Plantagenet pretenders, children of robber barons and Central Committee bureaucrats, street gangs and conquerors of nations, members of confident majorities, obscure sects, and reviled minorities, this self-serving attitude seems as natural as breathing. It draws sustenance from the same psychic wellsprings as sexism, racism, nationalism, and the other deadly chauvinisms that plague our species.
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| — | Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot (via thesockdolager) |
On the scale of worlds—to say nothing of stars or galaxies—humans are inconsequential, a thin film of life on an obscure and solitary lump of rock and metal.
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| — | Carl Sagan (Pale Blue Dot) |
Carl Sagan: To the Sky
Excerpts from Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space:
When my grandparents were children, the electric light, the automobile, the airplane, and the radio were stupefying technological advances, the wonders of the age. But in that same time, around the turn of the last century, there were two men who foresaw other, far more ambitious, inventions — Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Robert Goddard. They dreamt of using rockets to journey to the planets and the stars. Step by step, they worked out the fundamental physics and many of the details. Gradually, their machines took shape. Ultimately, their dream proved infectious.A generation later, inspired by Tsiolkovsky and Goddard, Wernher von Braun was constructing the first rocket capable of reaching the edge of space, the V-2. But in one of those ironies with which the twentieth century is replete, von Braun was building it for the Nazis — as an instrument of indiscriminate slaughter of civilians, as a “vengeance weapon” for Hitler, the rocket factories staffed with slave labor, untold human suffering exacted in the construction of every booster….
Another generation later, building on the work of Tsiolkovsky and Goddard, extending von Braun’s technological genius, we were up there in space, silently circumnavigating the Earth, treading the ancient and desolate lunar surface. Our machines—increasingly competent and autonomous—were spreading through the Solar System, discovering new worlds, examining them closely, searching for life, comparing them with Earth.
This is one reason that in the long astronomical perspective there is something truly epochal about “now”…. . And there’s a second reason: This is the first moment in the history of our planet when any species, by its own voluntary actions, has become a danger to itself….
We’ve been burning fossil fuels for hundreds of thousands of years. By the 1960s, there were so many of us burning wood, coal, oil, and natural gas on so large a scale, that scientists began to worry about the increasing greenhouse effect; the dangers of global warming began slowly slipping into public consciousness.
Nuclear weapons were invented in 1945. It took until 1983 before the global consequences of thermonuclear war were understood. By 1992, large numbers of warheads were being dismantled.
Biological warfare has been with us for centuries, but its deadly mating with molecular biology has occurred only lately.
We humans have already precipitated extinctions of species on a scale unprecedented since the end of the Cretaceous Period. But only in the last decade has the magnitude of these extinctions become clear, and the possibility raised that in our ignorance of the interrelations of life on Earth we may be endangering our own future.
In the littered field of discredited self-congratulatory chauvinisms, there is only one that seems to hold up, one sense in which we are special: Due to our own actions or inactions, and the misuse of our technology, we live at an extraordinary moment, for the Earth at least—the first time that a species has become able to wipe itself out. But this is also, we may note, the first time that a species has become able to journey to the planets and the stars. The two times, brought about by the same technology, coincide….
It might be a familiar progression, transpiring on many worlds—a planet, newly formed, placidly revolves around its star; life slowly forms; a kaleidoscopic procession of creatures evolves; intelligence emerges which, at least up to a point, confers enormous survival value; and then technology is invented. It dawns on them that there are such things as laws of Nature, that these laws can be revealed by experiment, and that knowledge of these laws can be made both to save and to take lives, both on unprecedented scales. Science, they recognize, grants immense powers. In a flash, they create world-altering contrivances. Some planetary civilizations see their way through, place limits on what may and what must not be done, and safely pass through the time of perils. Others are not so lucky or so prudent, perish.
Since, in the long run, every planetary society will be endangered by impacts from space, every surviving civilization is obliged to become spacefaring—-not because of exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical reason imaginable: staying alive. And once you’re out there in space for centuries, for millennia, moving little worlds around and engineering planets, your species has been pried loose from its cradle. If they exist, many other civilizations will eventually venture far from home.
Of course we must keep our planet habitable—not on a leisurely timescale of centuries or millennia, but urgently, on a timescale of decades or even years. This will involve changes in government, in industry, in ethics, in economics, and in religion. We’ve never done such a thing before, certainly not on a global scale. It may be too difficult for us. Dangerous technologies may be too widespread. Corruption may be too pervasive. Too many leaders may be focused on the short term rather than the long. There may be too many quarreling ethnic groups, nation-states, and ideologies for the right kind of global change to be instituted. We may be too foolish to perceive even what the real dangers are, or that much of what we hear about them is determined by those with a vested interest in minimizing fundamental change.
However, we humans also have a history of making long-lasting social change that nearly everyone thought impossible. Since our earliest days, we’ve worked not just for our own advantage but for our children and our grandchildren. My grandparents and parents did so for me. We have often, despite our diversity, despite endemic hatreds, pulled together to face a common enemy. We seem, these days, much more willing to recognize the dangers before us than we were even a decade ago. The newly recognized dangers threaten all of us equally. No one can say how it will turn out down here.
The moon was where the tree of immortality grew in ancient Chinese myth. The tree of longevity if not of immortality, it seems, indeed grows on other worlds. If we were up there among the planets, if there were self-sufficient human communities on many worlds, our species would be insulated from catastrophe. A cataclysmic impact on one world would likely leave all the others untouched. The more of us beyond the Earth, the greater the diversity of worlds we inhabit, the more varied the planetary engineering, the greater the range of societal standards and values—then the safer the human species will be.
This strategy—breaking up into many smaller self-propagating groups, each with somewhat different strengths and concerns, but all marked by local pride—has been widely employed in the evolution of life on Earth, and by our own ancestors in particular. It may, in fact, be key to understanding why we humans are the way we are.
If our long-term survival is at stake, we have a basic responsibility to our species venture to other worlds.
Sailors on a becalmed sea, we sense the stirring of a breeze.
