In the book The Varieties of Scientific Experience by Carl Sagan --a highly distinguished American astronomer, astrophysicist, cosmologist, author, and science communicator in astronomy and other natural sciences, and one of the greatest beings of the century-- there was a passage (below) and a video (also linked below) that heavily touched me, and inspired me to expand my way of thinking and encouraged me to pursue and spark a greater magnitude and dynamic of conscious awareness. The state that the world is in, and has always been due to degrees of ignorance, imposed on me a strong urge to simply share this, and hope that it inspires and influences you in any way. Carl Sagan: I therefore think that the perspective of the Earth in space and time is something with enormous, not just educational but moral and ethical force. I believe it is lucky for us that this is the time when pictures of the Earth from space are fairly routinely available. We look at them and hardly pause to think what an extraordinary item that is. Our planet, the Earth, home, where we come from, seen from space. And when you look at it from space, I think it is immediately clear that it is a fragile, tiny world exquisitely sensitive to the depredations of its inhabitants. Its impossible, I think, not to look at that planet and think that what we are doing is foolish. We are spending a million MILLION dollars every year, worldwide, on armaments. Think of what you could do with a million million dollars. When you look at the Earth from space, it is striking. There are no national boundaries visible. They have been put there, like the equator and the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn, by humans. The planet is real. The life on it is real, and the political separations that have placed the planet in danger are of human manufacture. All the beings on this little world are mutually dependent. Its like living in a lifeboat. We breathe the air that Russians have breathed, and Zambians and Tasmanians and people all over the planet. Whatever the causes that divide us, as I said before, it is clear that the Earth will be here a thousand or a million years from now. The question, they key question, the central question --in a certain sense the only question-- is will we? “If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies you will not find another. Sagan lobbied NASA for years to instruct Voyager 2 (Space Probe) to look back to Earth and take a picture of it from out by Neptune. Then he asked us to meditate on that image and see our home for what it is --just a tiny pale blue dot afloat in the immensity of the universe. #Gaza #Palestine #Israel #Syria #Qatar #KSA #UAE #Egypt #Iraq #Russia #Ukraine #US #UN #Politics #War youtu.be/4PN5JJDh78I
Posted on: Tue, 19 Aug 2014 20:09:27 +0000
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