2014

What's that? The Northern Lights? Nope.It's obviously the night sky... and it is. With a single pale dot. You can see it if you look closely. It's roughly halfway down the ray of sunlight on the right.It's not much. In our era of 10 megapixel cameras the dot is tiny. It's only 0.12 pixels, in fact.And... that's us. That miniscule dot is planet Earth, seen from 3.7 billion miles (6 billion kilometers) away. Voyager 1 took the picture in 1990, looking backwards during its ongoing journey out of our solar system."From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. 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."The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena... Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privi...
Source: Doctor Grumpy in the House - Category: Neurologists Authors: Source Type: blogs