Recent thoughts on this bullshit war and reading Orb's Journal made me think of this quote I had heard on the Discovery channel a few nights ago. It was a special on the Voyager spacecraft, which was loaded up with all sorts of things from Earth - pictures, music, art, drawings - as it was sent out towards the edges of our solar system. It took pictures of our sister planets and, at the very edge of the system, a brillant scientist named Carl Sagan, successfully got NASA to point Voyager's cameras back at Earth, to see the "pale blue dot" the way someone from outside our system would see it. These are part of his thoughts.


... 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.

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 this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, 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.

We're so small. And our differences so minor. All alone in the night, and we can't even live on this wonderful little planet together. What is it all for? This war and hatred? For a cosmic blink of an eye in so-called "glory." We should be humbled by this, our home, so small and solitary. We should realize that we all live here together and we shouldn't be so quick to hate each other. I think this image and his words ring with truth and I hope everyone takes a minute to really think about the context of this in the latest line of wars that we're blindly stumbling into.

~ flowers bloom near Memory and Dream at 1/20/2003 02:00:58 PM ~ ~