The people on here that know me are aware of my love of the sciences (a science "geek" if you will), so I offer this.

The following is an excerpt taken from a commencement speech by Dr. Carl Sagan in May 1999. It deserves some contemplation..

quote:

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We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a 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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May we prevail against all things that threaten our planet, the "Pale Blue Dot" of the Universe.

quote:

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Originally posted by Kevin:
The following is an excerpt taken from a commencement speech by Dr. Carl Sagan in May 1999. It deserves some contemplation..

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Wow. Sagan writes very eloquently for someone who died in 1997.

It's actually from Sagan's book "Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space", and was published in 1994. Before he died.

I realized later that I had put in the wrong date. It was 1996. I posted this just before I had to leave.

And yes, it was in his book, but he also used it in his speech.

And also (not to pick nits), he passed away on December 20, 1996. I remember that date well. Not just because I admired the man, but it happened to be the night our our astronomy club meeting. We drank a toast in his honor.

And to others: We all have people we admire, even though others may not think too highly of them.

I do wonder if finding extra terrestrial intelligence somewhere might really help bringing people on this planet together, as depicted in so many science fiction movies. The history according to Star Trek might be utopic, but I like to believe that there's some truth in it's ideas.