During a public lecture at Cornell University in 1994, Carl Sagan presented the image to the audience and shared his reflections on the deeper meaning behind the idea of the Pale Blue Dot:
"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".
Masterminded by Carl Sagan, the final photograph of Earth, the 'Pale Blue Dot', taken by Voyager 1, some 3.7 billion miles away from our planet...the very concept is mind blowing...After it nearly didn't happen at all (the photograph), what a wonderful idea and achievement of Sagan's, to convince NASA to turn Voyager's camera around to take this one last photograph of Earth...a truly amazing image.
“Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.”
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Artists are people driven by the tension between the desire to communicate and the desire to hide.
- D.W. Winnicott
Le secret d'une vie bien remplie est de vivre et de frayer avec les autres comme si demain ils risquaient de ne plus être là comme si vous risquiez de ne pas être là. Cela élimine le vice des tergiversations le péché de remettre à plus tard, les communions manquées.
Anaïs Nin, mai 1946
Journal, tome 4 : 1944 - 1947
The secret to a fulfilling life is to live and interact with others as if they might no longer be there tomorrow, as if you might not be there. This eliminates the vice of procrastination, the sin of procrastination, and missed communions.
Anaïs Nin, May 1946
Journal, Volume 4: 1944-1947
“I remember I used to half believe and wholly play with fairies when I was a child. What heaven can be more real than to retain the spirit-world of childhood, tempered and balanced by knowledge and common-sense.”
— Beatrix Potter, The Journal of Beatrix Potter from 1881-1897
“The desire to enrich and beautify things cannot be interpreted materialistically, that is, in the sense of increasing their value as possessions; rather, it stems from the instinct for perfection and the creative act.”
Sophie Taeuber-Arp
— Virginia Woolf, from The Complete Works; "Jacob's Room," wr. c. 1922
“A Communist system can be recognized by the fact that it spares the criminals and criminalizes the political opponent.”
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
"The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie.”
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Nature is intricate, overlapped, interweaved, and endless.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life
Trust in dreams, for in them is hidden the gate to eternity.
~Khalil Gibran
“Greatness is for someone else. You don’t get to experience your own greatness. And if you do…maybe you’re not that great.”
Daniel Arnold
New York photographer/Street-Photographer
”Fear prophets and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them.“
– Umberto Eco, philosopher & novelist (1932-2016)
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"Bees shouldn't waste their time telling flies that honey tastes better than shit!"
Frank Turner
‘Creative people need time to just sit around and do nothing’.
— Austin Kleon
"Rock and Roll, it's the only religion I've found that never lets you down."
Lemmy
https://billnelson.bandcamp.com/track/struck-dumb-by-beauty-again
“I do believe the most important aspect of music is its marvellous ability to allow everyone to invest their own personal memories and associations into it – to make it their own. In very general terms, though – what I hope for is a sort of ‘recollection in tranquility’, the long view, a sense of passing time and change, but around certain things that will always stay the same.”
— John Foxx
https://spillmagazine.com/spill-feature-recollection-in-tranquility-a-conversation-with-john-foxx/
"The people will believe what the media tells them they believe"
George Orwell
Is it me, or are the Dominos Pizza yodelling ads currently the most irritating thing on British TV?
Also, why, in this day and age, can't Calgone get a properly synched ad?
😁😁😁
Aaaaaaahahahaha 😂
If you'll allow me the luxury of a "grumpy old geezer" observation, may I point out that most of the "quotes & reflections" above are nothing of the sort. They are basically phone memes. This tendency is spreading - it's a sure sign of neural malaise!
Here's a real quote (from Umberto Eco's essay, Ur-Fascism):
'Fascist societies rhetorically cast their enemies as "at the same time too strong and too weak." On the one hand, fascists play up the power of certain disfavored elites to encourage in their followers a sense of grievance and humiliation. On the other hand, fascist leaders point to the decadence of those elites as proof of their ultimate feebleness in the face of an overwhelming popular will.'
And here's my reflection on it:
It sounds just like the way Fox News (etc) depicts its main enemy - ie generalised "liberals". As both too strong (establishment elite, liberal media in bed with Deep State, controlling everything, etc), and too weak (morally compromised by corporate ties and global interests, unpatriotic, too weak to implement radical right politicies, etc).
You're welcome. 😁
Thankfully, it's not winter yet 😮
Soon the child’s clear eye is clouded over by ideas and opinions, preconceptions, and abstractions. Simple free being becomes encrusted with the burdensome armor of the ego. Not until years later does an instinct come that a vital sense of mystery has been withdrawn. The sun glints through the pines and the heart is pierced in a moment of beauty and strange pain, like a memory of paradise. After that day, we become seekers.
Peter Matthiessen
If blacks have a case against America,
What case do Native Americans have?
Oh yeah, Americans (Euro-Americans, etc.) don't want to address the near holocost of Native Americans during its founding and rise as "the shining beacon of human rights and justice in the world."
One of the sources of Hitler's holocost of the Jews was the final solutions of America's indigenous peoples.
“Have fun with everything you do. Be comfortable. No need to act like you’re somebody else. Be yourself. That’s good enough.”
— Willie Mays