We live on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam

[feather]

Someone pointed me to this, thought it's a really cool quote from Carl Sagan.

Earth, as seen by Voyager 1 at a distance of 4 billion miles (Image from JPL/NASA).

Voyager 1 was about 6.4 billion kilometers (4 billion miles) away, and approximately 32 degrees above the ecliptic plane, when it captured this portrait of our world. Caught in the center of scattered light rays (a result of taking the picture so close to the Sun), Earth appears as a tiny point of light, a crescent only 0.12 pixel in size

Look again at 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.

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[rainman]

Re: We live on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam

funny that i see this first thing this morning. i was discussing infinite smallness with my 8 & 9 year old this morning on the way to school. they watched men in black 2 last night and the locker scene at the end of the movie blew them away.

nice post

[Mariner1]

Re: We live on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam

size, gunslinger, size

[coliver1980]

Re: We live on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam

It certainly puts your thinking cap on.

[Adzey]

Re: We live on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam

size, gunslinger, size

is that a quote from the dark tower?

[floridaorange]

Re: We live on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam

+1, the next time anything stresses you out imagine this.

[Steve Graham]

Re: We live on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam

really put shit into perspective right? lol

In the big picture, somethings really are not that relevant

[floridaorange]

Re: We live on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam

Thought this was a pretty funny excerpt from Sagan's wikipedia:

In 1994, Apple Computer began developing the Power Macintosh 7100. They chose the internal code name "Carl Sagan", the reference being that the mid-range PowerMac 7100 should make Apple "billions and billions."[3] Though the internal project name was never used in public marketing, it did come up in usenet postings and news of the name grew from there. When Sagan learned of this he sued Apple Computer to force the use of a different project name. Other models released conjointly had code names such as "Cold fusion" and "Piltdown Man", and Sagan was displeased at being associated with what he considered pseudoscience. (He was at the time writing a book discrediting pseudoscience.) Though Sagan lost the lawsuit Apple engineers complied with his demands anyway and renamed the project "BHA" (for Butt-Head Astronomer). Sagan promptly sued Apple for libel over the new name, claiming that it subjected him to contempt and ridicule, but he lost this lawsuit as well. Still, the 7100 saw another name change: it was finally referred to internally as "LAW" (Lawyers Are Wimps).

Carl Sagan on Charlie Rose

[GVIDEO]http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2181165206611526024[/GVIDEO]

[Mariner1]

Re: We live on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam

is that a quote from the dark tower?

Yeah. here's the full quote. (i've actually never understood that series, i'll just wait for the movie to be my cliffs notes)

"The greatest mystery the universe offers is not life but size. Size encompasses life, and the Tower encompasses size. The child, who is most at home with wonder, says: Daddy, what is above the sky? And the father says: The darkness of space. The child: What is beyond space? The father: The galaxy. The child: Beyond the galaxy? The father: Another galaxy. The child: Beyond the other galaxies? The father: No one knows.



"You see? Size defeats us. For the fish, the lake in which he lives is the universe. What does the fish think when he is jerked up by the mouth through the silver limits of existence and into a new universe where the air drowns him and the light is blue madness? Where huge bipeds with no gills stuff it into a suffocating box abd cover it with wet weeds to die?



"Or one might take the tip of the pencil and magnify it. One reaches the point where a stunning realization strikes home: The pencil tip is not solid; it is composed of atoms which whirl and revolve like a trillion demon planets. What seems solid to us is actually only a loose net held together by gravity. Viewed at their actual size, the distances between these atoms might become league, gulfs, aeons. The atoms themselves are composed of nuclei and revolving protons and electrons. One may step down further to subatomic particles. And then to what? Tachyons? Nothing? Of course not. Everything in the universe denies nothing; to suggest an ending is the one absurdity.



"If you fell outward to the limit of the universe, would you find a board fence and signs reading DEAD END? No. You might find something hard and rounded, as the chick must see the egg from the inside. And if you should peck through the shell (or find a door), what great and torrential light might shine through your opening at the end of space? Might you look through and discover our entire universe is but part of one atom on a blade of grass? Might you be forced to think that by burning a twig you incinerate an eternity of eternities? That existence rises not to one infinite but to an infinity of them?



"Perhaps you saw what place our universe plays in the scheme of things - as no more than an atom in a blade of grass. Could it be that everything we can perceive, from the microscopic virus to the distant Horsehead Nebula, is contained in one blade of grass that may have existed for only a single season in an alien time-flow? What if that blade should be cut off by a scythe? When it begins to die, would the rot seep into our universe and our own lives, turning everthing yellow and brown and desiccated? Perhaps it's already begun to happen. We say the world has moved on; maybe we really mean that it has begun to dry up.



"Think how small such a concept of things make us, gunslinger! If a God watches over it all, does He actually mete out justice for such a race of gnats? Does His eye see the sparrow fall when the sparrow is less than a speck of hydrogen floating disconnected in the depth of space? And if He does see... what must the nature of such a God be? Where does He live? How is it possible to live beyond infinity?



"Imagine the sand of the Mohaine Desert, which you crossed to find me, and imagine a trillion universes - not worlds by universes - encapsulated in each grain of that desert; and within each universe an infinity of others. We tower over these universes from our pitiful grass vantage point; with one swing of your boot you may knock a billion billion worlds flying off into darkness, a chain never to be completed.



"Size, gunslinger... size.



"Yet suppose further. Suppose that all worlds, all universes, met at a single nexus, a single pylon, a Tower. And within it, a stairway, perhaps rising to the Godhead itself. Would you dare climb to the top, gunslinger? Could it be that somewhere above all of endless reality, there exists a room?...
"You dare not."



And in the gunslinger's mind, those words echoed: You dare not.

[Adzey]

Re: We live on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam

ok so what didnt you understand?

for me this is my favourite series period

[Mariner1]

Re: We live on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam

ok so what didnt you understand?

for me this is my favourite series period

all of it. but i admit, i LOVED the scene where he was in that old town, the way King described Gunslinger shooting & reloading at the same time. It's been years since i tried to read that book.

can i get a cliff's anyone?

[i!!ustrious]

Re: We live on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam

nice one's feather, fo, and mariner. cheers.

i'll just leave this here. honestly, i can't remember where i found it. thought it might make for some nice food for thought and pondering, no doubt.

"The Boundless, the infinitude of encompassing Space, is obviously beyond reach of any human conception, because it is both formless and without confining frontiers, and yet is the cosmic womb of all the universes which appear from it like "sparks of Eternity." Therefore have mystics of various ages and of all countries called it the Void.


This in fact was the original and truly sublime idea which the earliest Christian theological speculators seized upon and called 'Nothing,' thus not merely distorting but positively nullifying the conception as it was in its primeval grandeur. From that day to this, orthodox theology has made God Almighty create the world out of nothing, which is absurd. Had they conceived of this precosmic Utterness as No-Thing, then they would have preserved the correct idea. But they reduced it to nothingness. Preserving the verbal form, they lost the spirit.

Through the ages man in his uninitiated mind has degraded the intuitions of his spirit, confounding the objective and the illusory with the Real and, what is still more serious for his moral and spiritual well-being, ungearing the aspiring intellect from its root in the Boundless.

Let us not forget that we ourselves are offsprings of the Boundless, and urged by the impelling energy of our spirit are advancing through inner struggles and trials -- always advancing to that ultimate consummation of our spiritual self with that limitless Wonder which is our inmost. Yet, most marvelous of paradoxes, this Wonder is throughout eternity unattainable, for it is limitless Space and frontierless Duration."

[Garrick]

Re: We live on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam

somethings really are not that relevant

that's all relevant.