Thursday, November 11, 2010

Pale Blue Dot



I found this on (where else?) Wikipedia today with the accompanying description:

"Pale Blue Dot" is the name given to this 1990 photo of Earth taken from Voyager 1 when its vantage point reached the edge of the Solar System, a distance of roughly 3.7 billion miles (6 billion kilometres). Earth can be seen as a blueish-white speck approximately halfway down the brown band to the right. The light band over Earth is an artifact of sunlight scattering in the camera's lens, resulting from the small angle between Earth and the Sun. Carl Sagan came up with the idea of turning the spacecraft around to take a composite image of the Solar System. Six years later, he reflected, "All of human history has happened on that tiny pixel, which is our only home."

So when you think about this - the fact that "all of human history has happened on that tiny pixel, which is our only home", this insignificant pixel in the whole of things - why do we still bother with wars and conflicts? I mean, natural disasters cause human suffering and death, ok, we can't avoid those, but the results of wars are man-made suffering and death of our fellow human beings.

Lest we forget.

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