Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Our speck in space (thanks to NASA, Carl Sagan & @Monicks)

Today I saw a version of this picture with this quotation and was in awe once again, of the vastness we move through every day on our small blue orb. And how speck-like and innocent it seems.  The picture was posted on Twitter by a person named @Monicks but the printed quote was a part of the picture and the text was hard to read to my old eyes. So I hunted up a different version of the photo (found at WikiPedia) and the quote to go with it, so I could share it in larger type So Thank you @Monicks for inspiring me. This picture was taken by the Voyager 1 as it left our solar system in 1990. The little speck inside the circle is Earth seen from close to 4 BILLION miles away.  Here is what Carl Sagan said about this picture:

"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." ---- Carl Sagan
This inspired a poem