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Re: are we alone? [message #295417 is a reply to message #288258] Wed, 07 November 2007 16:43 Go to previous messageGo to previous message
Blazer is currently offline  Blazer
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Blue_Dot

Does it really matter? I for one believe that the universe is too big to be completely empty. Some people believe that the earth is the "center" of the universe, but when you consider what an insignificant speck we are in the cosmos, for all our grand thinking, we aren't really squat.

I'd love to meet some aliens, but honestly, any advanced race would study us from orbit for a day or two, and decide that we are too primitive and barbaric to make contact with. Yeah, we like to think we are advanced and live in a star-trek like utopia...but go take a walk around your city after midnight, and see how safe you feel Razz

So, on one hand, maybe we should stop looking and hoping for aliens to come down and share technology with us and comfort us into not being alone, and concentrate on the home that we know for sure we have...instead of trashing the planet like some tenants that are about to move out of an apartment. Even if we were alone in the universe, we still have each other, if we could just stop all the hating and try to improve our overall group consciousness, we could truly advance as a race and maybe someday be worthy of meeting any other intelligent life that could be out there.

Carl Sagan, 1996

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 know, everyone you love, everyone you've ever heard of, every human being who ever was, 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 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 this pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

 
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