Pale Blue Dot

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ex-l

ex-BK

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Pale Blue Dot

Post20 Jul 2013

On Friday NASA's Cassini spacecraft took a picture of Earth and its seven billion inhabitants from 1,440,000,000 kilometres away ... of what Carl Sagan called "the Pale Blue Dot".

In the finished image, our entire planet appears as no more than a pale, blue dot, peeping through one of Saturn rings.

I think it's humbling to remember, from time to time how insignificant we and all of our enterprises are, and to question the importance we or others encourage us to invest into them.

Pale_Blue_Dot.png
An earlier photo, see planet Earth at about "3:15 pm" in the yellowish stripe
Pale_Blue_Dot.png (238.54 KiB) Viewed 8634 times
Carl Sagan wrote:From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again 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.

Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, 1997 reprint, pp. xv–xvi

dany

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Re: Pale Blue Dot

Post20 Jul 2013

May be one of these days, a NASA space ship will arrive to "BK world of souls", to be faced with a note hung on it's gate :
"Dormant Souls, Do not disturb, Go back to Earth" ...!!

dany

  • Posts: 192
  • Joined: 11 May 2012

Re: Pale Blue Dot

Post21 Jul 2013

Somehow, images derived from the Brahma Kumaris teachings and painted in the memory, remind me of "DISNEY WORLD", with all fantasies associated with it ..!!

Heaven on Earth, with Emperors and Empresses ... World of Souls ... Souls traveling in the universe and possessing different bodies ... BK centers turning into floating islands, after the destruction ... and many other BK related images, which can make an entertaining "CARTOON MOVIE", for the kids ...!!

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