From a Distance

I have been away from the blog for a few days now – more on all that, I’m sure, at some later date when I have figured out how to talk about the latest discoveries of my life!

Meanwhile, I wanted to share this aerial view of Sri Lanka. I had never seen it before this and it is truly spectacular. It is true that, from a distance, everything in the natural world looks amazingly beautiful, and from an every greater distance, no one part of the earth looks better or worse than any other. So while I post the video, I also want to post the well-known reflection by Carl Sagan, excerpted from a commencement address he delivered on May 11th, in 1996. These thoughts are expanded upon in his book, Pale Blue Dot. View, read, tell me what you think. Alas, I seem to be unable to embed this media try as I might. I’m giving up and just posting the link here.

“(Look) at that 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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