Carl Sagan's Pale blue dot image.

Great short film featuring Carl Sagan discussing NASA's famous
'pale blue dot' photograph of planet earth (image towards end of video).


As philosophers go,I think this man was truly ahead of his time:

"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".
Carl Sagan

Photograph of planet Earth taken by Voyager 1 which was 4 billion miles away:

"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.
Carl Sagan".

[edit on 02/10/08 by karl 12]

Not much to look at is it?

Mr Sagan had a wonderful perspective on things didn't he and certainly opened my mind a little with his "Cosmos" series.

Thanks for posting this.

reply to post by nerbot



Yeah I'm sure " Billions and Billions " have viewed the series by now.
He was very far forward thinking I miss him.


[edit on 17-2-2009 by SLAYER69]

Thanks for putting things into perspective here. In their arrogant self-importance humans think their personal problems are of great signficance. Which they are not...when seen from this perspective.

That image is still absolutely breathtaking. And we think we're all that....

It actually makes me really emotional to see it again. It has even more impact on me now, for some reason.

Great thread...thank you!

Oh yes, Ive seen that picture before and it NEVER ceases to amaze me. It just shows that we truly are nothing compared to the vastness that is the whole universe.

Yet we keep fighting as it says" To momentarily be the master of a fraction of a dot"

For what its worth I have another video here that is similar and I enjoy it very much. its another great video none the less.



These two videos are so deep and amazing. I see those images of our tiny little dot that is a planet then I look out at our sky and think, if something so tiny and insignificat looking as earth looks in those pics can have life, I just know that there is all kinds of wonderfull and beautiful life out there some where.



[edit on 17-2-2009 by gimme_some_truth]

Originally posted by gimme_some_truth
Oh yes, Ive seen that picture before and it NEVER ceases to amaze me. It just shows that we truly are nothing compared to the vastness that is the whole universe.

Thanks for the replies,the image is a truly humbling one and it certainly makes one wonder.

GST-thats a great short film vid,thanks for posting! Towards the end of the vid,Carl Sagan makes a very pertinent point about healthy scepticism - its probably more relevant nowadays than ever.

As for the sheer size and scale of cosmos its interesting that a recent German super-computer has now estimated theres a mindbogglingly incomprehensible 540 billion galaxies in the universe (each containing 10 to 100 billion stars) - it makes my head hurt just thinking about it.
Cheers.


[edit on 02/10/08 by karl 12]

Originally posted by karl 12


GST-thats a great short film vid,thanks for posting! Towards the end of the vid,Carl Sagan makes a very pertinent point about healthy scepticism - its probably more relevant nowadays than ever.

You are absolutley welcome. I thought that you might like it and I figured others would as well. It complimented the one you posted as well.

Carl Sagan was an amazing man. He made astro physics more accessable to the common man. He is, according to my dad, the reason why he got into this stuff.

Carl has a way of describing things thats grabs the "common man" and sucks them into it and gets them involved. I hope one day that I can have a similar effect on people when it comes to the unknownparanormal in general.


Anyway, it is truly humbling to see that to some one else on the other side of the galaxy we are just a pale blue dot.


Peace and Love

Also I know one picture has been posted of the "pale blue dot" but I wanted to post the pictures that I have that dont have the words and arrow on them.




Truly amazing and beautiful isnt it?

What's with the lines in the pictures? Radiation, ect?

I always did kinda know we're pretty much a speck of dust lodged in god's nose.

reply to post by wylekat


I think the lines are sunlight. Apparently it was taken through several filters, and from 4 or something billion miles away.

Definitely puts everything into perspective, everyone fighting wars, arguing about religion, worried about money, they just need to sit down and think if it's all really worth it.

You know what would be a fascinating picture... I'd like to see what the sun looks like from 40AU, ie. outside pluto's orbit.
Preferrably with a high-res camera rather than the hubble's one.

Carl Sagan deeply inspired my perception of the cosmos and our place in it. The movie Contact affected me and still does, and the beginning zoom out from the Earth is something I'll never get tired of. That movie really got me interested in Sagan's work, and I then began to read Michio Kaku, Paul Davies, and Brian Greene.

Below is a video I put together using using the Contact 'zoom-out' (4x speed) as well as bits of the movie 'Stargate,' science documentaries, and various fractal animations. It was inspired by reading the work of those listed above, and is basically how I imagine the universe -- actually the multiverse.

The video is a zoom-out beyond the reaches of the known universe and out into hyperspace, eventually leading to the multiversal realm. You then enter a parallel universe and zoom in all the way down to the subatomic level of a parallel 'Earth.' *The neural net in the middle of the video represents the multiverse:



[edit on 17/2/09 by Evasius]

So we are all just hanging out in the yellow band of the universal rainbow!

Weeeeeeeeeee!!




That vid was really GOOD Evasius....................well done

[edit on 17-2-2009 by theRiverGoddess]

The image of the Pale Blue Dot is the number one thing that inspires me to do good on this Earth. Many people think that in order to do good things one has to be religious. For me, not so. This picture shows us a priceless image of our planet up against the infinite. We are less significant than we think we are.

No, we are not colonizing any planet any time soon. Not one of our space vessles have made it out of the solar system yet. Mars is too cold and dry and would take huge adavancements in engineering to melt its caps. Not for many years folks. For now, this is all we have. Take care of it. Don't think of it as an outside object because the reality is, you were made from this earth and it has the power to destroy us all if we are not responsible. Just as Sagan said, "Cherish the Pale Blue Dot."

This video is similar but out of the Pale Blue Dot videos, it is my personal favorite:

Originally posted by karl 12

"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.
Carl Sagan".

The quote above is a very powerful message that I wish everybody in the world could read.

It reminds me of the lyrics of a Tool song called "Right In Two"..

www.azlyrics.com...

"Monkey killing monkey killing monkey.
Over pieces of the ground."

S and F

When Carl Sagan's Cosmos series was on television I was in my
early teens. Watching him show models that illustrated "Billions"
was fascinating. Now, politicians and economists are throwing
around dollar figures in the Hundreds of Billions and Trillions so
frequently that young people probably wouldn't be impressed at
all by Mr. Sagan's impressive number demonstrations.

But there was one Cosmos episode where Carl estimated the
number of objects in the Universe (or something to that effect)
to be some really huge number. I think he called it a "Googleplex"?
I bet the Google search engine founders watched Cosmos!
-CWM

Originally posted by nerbot
Not much to look at is it?

Mr Sagan had a wonderful perspective on things didn't he and certainly opened my mind a little with his "Cosmos" series.

Thanks for posting this.

Carl Sagan is an admitted DOPE FIEND and thereby a degenerate deviant scourge upon society.

Wait, what was that about perspective and mind opening? Hmm...wonder if there's any connection

Yeah, I red Cosmos a few years ago and it was very enlightening. Even though he seems a bit too skeptical about alien life for my taste.

[edit on 17-2-2009 by shipovfools]

One of the best thread ever!!

He was truly awake. Not sure where I was when this was released....but I missed it completely. Hopefully this will stir a few more hearts and minds to wake up.