We are star-stuff. Cosmos, billions, and a pale blue dot. Thanks, Carl Sagan!

[mrmephistopheles]

Who is Carl Sagan?

Perhaps more appropriately, who was Carl Sagan. Carl was a world-renowned astronomer, astrophysicist, and author.

If you've seen Contact, you're somewhat familiar with his work, although the book is far better (and has far less Matthew McConaughey)

Perhaps you're a child of the 80s, and saw his PBS series Cosmos (also shown at the 10th anniversary in the 90s. If you missed it (and you're in the US), you can watch it now, for free on Hulu.


Carl was a neat guy. He was agnostic, against nuclear proliferation, for marijuana decriminalization, and just generally a cool cat.

He's so neat, he's been remixed into a YouTube music video.

Carl's calm and staggered speech pattern has been compared to a certain 'Agent'.

Carl was a part of the Voyager spacecraft program. Toward the end of active research in 1989, the NASA administration permitted a maneuver he'd been begging for since the early 80s - turn the camera around and point it back toward Earth.

This is what they got:


Doesn't look like much, does it?

I mean, a multimillion-dollar spacecraft with a high-tech camera can't take a simple picture of Earth? Where's the beef?

But wait.

What's that little speck in the beam on the far right?

That's Earth.

Taken from 3.75 billion miles away, this image shows us just how small our 'great big world' really is.

Carl had some thoughts on the image, of course.

Originally Posted by Carl Sagan

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. 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.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. 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 with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

Man. He had a way with words, didn't he?

Oh right. HE DID!

Originally Posted by Carl Sagan

“We have a choice. We can enhance life and come to know the universe that made us, or we can squander our fifteen billion year heritage in meaningless self destruction.”

Originally Posted by Carl Sagan

If you wish to make and apple pie from scratch, you must first, invent the universe.

Originally Posted by Carl Sagan

We are a way for the universe to know itself. For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

Originally Posted by Carl Sagan

"[The nuclear arms race is like] two sworn enemies standing waist deep in gasoline, one with three matches, the other with five."

Carl Sagan - 1934-1996






This thread is for awesome scientists/astronomers/etc, but mainly Carl Sagan. Threadshit and you'll get it back tenfold.