May 17, 201016 yr comment_8949 Earth as seen from Voyager 1 while on the edge of our solar system (approximately 3,762,136,324 miles from home).In the words of Carl Sagan (god rest his soul!):Look again at that dot. 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. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, 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 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 this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, 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.The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. 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 with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known. Report
May 17, 201016 yr comment_8958 I love space and photos of it. It's so big, it's impossible to comprehend, yet we know next to nothing about it. Report
May 17, 201016 yr comment_8961 It's impossible to wrap your mind around how big the universe really is. Report
May 17, 201016 yr comment_9013 It's impossible to wrap your mind around how big the universe really is.When I was a little girl, to calm myself down, I used to try to imagine infinite space, You just keep going with no end. I used to imagine what was beyond the beyond. I'd imagine hitting a some wall, and then, in my mind, saying, "nope, that walls not there, it keeps going." To this day, the vastness of space is still a thing of wonder, and knowing that even if we could obtain light speed somehow, it'd still take hundreds of lifetimes to reach those other stars that twinkle in our night sky. Report
May 18, 201016 yr comment_9029 It's impossible to wrap your mind around how big the universe really is.and just think, the universe is still expanding. Report
May 18, 201016 yr comment_9032 damn thats a pretty deep paragraph there. really makes you think about what we have here on earth Report
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