The Pale Blue Dot - Now with added pics

[Kaboose the Moose]

Today at lecture I sat through the topic of gravitaional lensing and how the gravity of an object can warp space-time and causes the light to bend, creating somewhat of a lens effect. By the end the lecturer then decided to spend the last few minutes showing a slideshow of some pics taken from various telescopes and space probes.

Like these:

Spoiler: Orion Nebula - 1,500 Light Years Away

Spoiler: Carina Nebula - 7500 Light years away

Is it just me or is it giving us the finger from almost 8000 light years away?

Spoiler: Sombrero Galaxy - 30 megalight-years away

Spoiler: Hubble Ultra Deep Field (3100x3100 pic version)

Aside from the few stars you see in the foreground, just about everything in that image is a galaxy, down to the tiniest point. This makes up some 10'000 galaxies and the image is roughly one thirteen-millionth of the total area of the sky. The light that you are looking at is 13 billion years old. For those not keeping score, that places the universe at approximately 800 million years old in this snapshot. That's pretty much the nanosecond after the sperm hit the egg in human terms.

Spoiler: Antennae Galaxies in Collision

Spoiler: The Pillars of Creation (it's 10 times cooler with a name like that)

Spoiler: Spiral Galaxy M74

These were just some of the pics that were thrown about but the final picture to be shown was that taken from Voyager 1 in 1990. A picture titled "The Pale Blue Dot" :

That little speck...is us, seen from 3.7 billion miles away. I don't think there has been a single picture I have seen that is as humbling as that.

I think astronomer Carl Sagan said it best when he said:

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.

So Escapists, this is my long drawn out way of asking..what does that picture convey to?. What exactly is your feeling about space?. What are your philosophical thoughts about space?. Are we alone?. Are you humbled?.

 

[Lord Mountbatten Reborn]

That certainly is humbling. I should really shrug it off with a hilarious joke. Ah well.

 

[ghalkhsdkssakgh]

Wow...that's quite something. Really puts all the petty squabbling and masturbation jokes into perspective. Ah well.

 

[FluffX]

That certainly is humbling. I should really shrug it off with a hilarious joke. Ah well.

How about "Hey, I can see my house from there!"?

 

[toapat]

those are some sweet clouds.

and its not the universe flipping us off, its flipping someone else off

 

[JRCB]

Wow. I love the picture of the sombrero galaxy.

And I've know a lot of that. For everything we do, no matter how great we are, we're still a grain of sand (the earth, that is) in the beach of the universe.

 

[Ryuk2]

I feel sad. What he said made me think about our lives and how small we truly are.
If they can see us from there, than they can see other planets, that could have life on them,... but damn, they haven't seen any yet. I think we are alone here, on this planet.
''..there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.'' So true... blah, i hate this place.

 

[Kaboose the Moose]

those are some sweet clouds.

and its not the universe flipping us off, its flipping someone else off

Ah!. I think we are in the way though...

 

[XJ-0461]

In taht tiny little dot is everything all of us hold dear. That makes me feel quite lonely, especially in the grand scheme of things.

 

[Kingsman]

I came across the Carl Sagan quote ages ago on a different website. It is, indeed, humbling.

It's also hard to say anything else when Carl pretty much said everything there is to say.

 

[McHanhan]

Holy crap that is just stunning!!. And no, we can't be alone. No way, just look at all those galaxies in the Hubble Deep Space image. All those galaxies there must be one planet that has life..even say a single Vogon. There has to be somebody otherwise its a massive waste of space!

 

[philosophicalbastard]

Coincedantelly, if you play with the brightness and contrast of the top picture you get a really cool rainbow.

OT:Yes, that is very humbling. But I would rather think about how small this universe is compared to others.

 

[El Poncho]

I feel sad. What he said made me think about our lives and how small we truly are.
If they can see us from there, than they can see other planets, that could have life on them,... but damn, they haven't seen any yet. I think we are alone here, on this planet.
''..there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.'' So true... blah, i hate this place.

Didn't they see a planet similar to earth just a few months/weeks ago? We could see a really good picture of it, just not whats in it.

 

[Ryuk2]

Didn't they see a planet similar to earth just a few months/weeks ago? We could see a really good picture of it, just not whats in it.

Well, that sound good. Good to know there are at least one planet like earth, but we still need to see that planet closer, to be sure there is something and the chances are extremely small... so meh.

 

[superbleeder12]

I'm going to go stream "The Cosmos" from netflix now.

 

[Robert632]

that's probably the most fascinating thing I've seen all day, though that isn't saying much, as all I've seen all day is Pokemon threads(may they die a violent death.), and 9/11 conspiracy theories.

 

[LockHeart]

Why is it everyone seems to think 'humbling' and I think 'opportunity'?

Those amazing pictures just show how far we can expand, gaining knowledge as we go, but it's very true - we're a tiny island in an endless sea, currently confined to a tiny speck of dirt on the universe's tablecloth.

 

[The_ModeRazor]

And to think that one day we might conquer all those other tiny dots...
Ahh, the joy.

Ok, that joke didn't work at all in the face of a fact this humbling.
We're pointless.

God that's even worse.

Damnit, I just said God.

You...
won.

 

[McHanhan]

What made this more epic for me was the fact that I was listening to Battlestar Galactica's Piano version of "All along the watchtower" while browsing the pics.

EPIC!

OT: I like to see it more as a humbling experience where we are just a tiny speck. Rather than this massive force of the universe. Until we build a death star that is.

Damnit..why do these jokes not have an effect in this thread?