Carl Sagan's Pale blue dot image.

Carl Sagan is brilliant as was his Cosmos series and book which I read when I was 14

reply to post by Kandinsky


K - Great post,the Hubble image is truly an amazing one- I think it should be compulsory viewing for all children everywhere (and some adults too).

This photo's a bit of a shocker and shows how 'pretty insignificant' our sun actualy is -even in our own galaxy.


www.atlasoftheuniverse.com...

Relative sizes:
elronsviewfromtheedge.wordpress.com...


And I've always found the similarities in these two photographs interesting

Cheers

[edit on 02/10/08 by karl 12]

reply to post by nrky


This picture was taken from farther then pluto's orbit, at about 4 billion miles away. Pluto is about 2.65 billion miles and only 28.6AU, this photo was taken from where your asking for about 40AU. So in reference this photo was taken nearly double the distance of pluto from earth.

reply to post by karl 12
Good work, Karl.
When I was a kid with a head full of dreams and nonsense, I'd lie on my back on the garage roof. I'd look into the night sky and imagine what was happening out there. Sometimes I could see my breath it was so cold, I'd get goosebumps from the wonder and the cold. This thread has the similar innocence of just

Here's a couple of images from a site I never even look at, but they are pretty good...the full five image sequence, beginning with Earth is here.





From the insides of an atom to the scale of of the universe, it's clear that Nature likes a pattern. It's all repeated on varying scales. Fractals, particles, planets, stars and galaxies.

Wow! I never imagined that stars could be that big..!!
I remember Richard Shaver's book "I Remember Lemuria" that depicted about the Ancient Gods that grow so tall that they move to the deep space, into the faraway stars. Kind of makes me wonder..perhaps the tall ancients (more than 30 feet above) really did exist and most already move to one of those stars...

Great thread. On a side note did you see the two potheads at the beginning of the vid? I will not adocate illegal drug use (although Carl sure did) on this site so hopefully they will add 1 of my anon posts to a thread finally.

Often when I hear someone mentioned as being ahead of their time(not ted) they have daily habits of breaking the law where flowers are concerned. Nothing they havent admitted themselves, I just think the outdated stereotypes have been put to bed years ago. WAKE UP.

absolutely the definition of awesome

thank you so much op for posting this as if you didnt i would never have seen this

reminds me of the true reason i want to be a film maker

great video, incredible way of putting things into perspective

one of the best posts ever here on ats


incredible video i really hope more people see

Originally posted by Dances With Angels
The image of the Pale Blue Dot is the number one thing that inspires me to do good on this Earth. Many people think that in order to do good things one has to be religious. For me, not so. This picture shows us a priceless image of our planet up against the infinite. We are less significant than we think we are.

Those are wise words and I agree with your comments about relative significance - I think the arrogant 'me me' factor (prevalent in a few religious mindsets) could do with being addressed as clinging to this insular and selfish opinion may have important repercussions for the survival of our species in the long run.

Heres some interesting quotes about the sheer size and scale of the cosmos and certain religious opinions :

"It doesn't seem to me that this fantastically marvelous universe, this tremendous range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different planets, and all these atoms with all their motions, and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil - which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama".
Richard Feynman


"In some respects, science has far surpassed religion in delivering awe. How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, "This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant. God must be even greater than we dreamed"? Instead they say, "No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way."
Carl Sagan


“The supreme arrogance of religious thinking: that a carbon-based bag of mostly water on a speck of iron-silicate dust around a boring dwarf star in a minor galaxy … would look up at the sky and declare, ‘It was all made just so that I could exist!’”
Physicist Peter Walker


"For most of human history we have searched for our place in the cosmos. Who are we? What are we? We find that we inhabit an insignificant planet of a hum-drum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people".
Carl Sagan


"God did it. He did not call it the universe -- that name is modern. His whole attention was upon this world. He constructed it in five days -- and then? It took him only one day to make twenty million suns and eighty million planets!
What were they for -- according to this idea? To furnish light for this little toy-world. That was his whole purpose; he had no other. One of the twenty million suns (the smallest one) was to light it in the daytime, the rest were to help one of the universe's countless moons modify the darkness of its nights".
Mark Twain

And just of topic but a great story by Carl Sagan:

A scientific colleague tells me about a recent trip to the New Guinea highlands where she visited a stone age culture hardly contacted by Western civilization. They were ignorant of wristwatches, soft drinks, and frozen food. But they knew about Apollo 11. They knew that humans had walked on the Moon. They knew the names of Armstrong and Aldrin and Collins. They wanted to know who was visiting the Moon these days.
Carl Sagan

[edit on 02/10/08 by karl 12]

Originally posted by carewemust
When Carl Sagan's Cosmos series was on television I was in my
early teens. Watching him show models that illustrated "Billions"
was fascinating.

CWM,I agree on that one - the series was great and the book (also called Cosmos) is an amazing read-I think it would be the one book I'd take to a desert island to stave of the boredom.

But there was one Cosmos episode where Carl estimated the
number of objects in the Universe (or something to that effect)
to be some really huge number. I think he called it a "Googleplex"?

A googolplex is precisely as far from infinity as is the number 1... no matter what number you have in mind, infinity is larger.
Carl Sagan

More quotes here:
refspace.com...:0
Cheers.

[edit on 02/10/08 by karl 12]

reply to post by Kandinsky


Classic stuff - Antares is just flabberghasting - no other word for it.

Found this other Hubble image which also puts things into perspective



[edit on 02/10/08 by karl 12]

S & F

i have copied and pasted alot of what has been posted on here and printed it out, betelgueuse, Antares etc

i will give it to my dad who is 76, at the weekend, he always said we were just flies!

I think we are fleas on flies legs

or mere motes on the dust of life?

oh dear, i think i am going insane

Originally posted by mattguy404
reply to post by wylekat

 

Definitely puts everything into perspective, everyone fighting wars, arguing about religion, worried about money, they just need to sit down and think if it's all really worth it.

Not sure if anyone else has mentioned it.

While I agree with every one who makes statements like this, the one thing you have to consider is as humans we are finite for the most part, with our life experiences confined to this round rock we where born on with little chance to get off it (even though its a nice rock). As such unfortunately that means we have more often than not a rather bloated view of ourselves and our place in the universe, but its a viewpoint that is justifiable for the most part given our rather confined circumstances. Why worry about our place in the universe when its still a fight for survival to cement our place on our planet against fellow human beings.

Now if and when we finally get out there regularly and get to meet or at least move around as common people on other worlds the earth/self centric viewpoint will definitely be something to scratch our heads over and wonder 'what were we thinking!?'

So dont dish the self centrics to much, its all the most of us have

edit:- Im not self centric personally just saying its an unfortunate side product of a over crowding world with little hope at the moment of getting off besides death.

[edit on 18-2-2009 by BigfootNZ]

reply to post by BigfootNZ


I believe that was the point of carl sagan's quote on page one.

Originally posted by BigfootNZ
So dont dish the self centrics to much, its all the most of us have

edit:- Im not self centric personally just saying its an unfortunate side product of a over crowding world with little hope at the moment of getting off besides death.

I see what you're saying but tend to disagree on some points -life can certainly be a struggle at times but a cursory education about certain aspects of the universe is virtualy free -just go to the library (everybodys got a brain and an imagination).

Also, I think the overcrowding myth has been a little embellished by the corporate media down the years.

Couldn't every single man ,woman and child on Earth live quite comfortably in a city within the confines of Texas?
www.zuko.com...
When you crunch the numbers it appears the world's population takes up as much space as a mosquito landing on a football (or a soccer ball if you're American).
Cheers.


[edit on 02/10/08 by karl 12]

Originally posted by nerbot
Mr Sagan had a wonderful perspective on things didn't he and certainly opened my mind a little with his "Cosmos" series.

I wrote a filk song (sci fi fen may know what a filk song is...) to the tune of I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy:

I'm a Carl Sagen Groupie.
Rerun Cosmos till I die!
I'm a real live billionth of his universe
I look every night to the sky.

I've a penchant for C. Sagan.
He's my universal beau.
Carl Sagan went on TV to inform the masses.
I love that Carl Sagan show!

Anyway... That was written a while ago, before the demise of Carl.

I won't call it false humility, because it isn't. There is real merit in seeing one's tiny rock of a home planet as humbly part of a greater community. However, I believe the self-congratulatory humility shindig here is a bit MISPLACED. It's frankly in the DUH file. It's very natural for a good number of inhabitants of a literally darker outer rim of a galaxy planet to want to be connected to where there is more light; toward the galactic center. That's not saying it's impossible for we Milky Way boondocks dwellers to infuse ourselves with a very whopping helping of figurative Light anyway.

Originally posted by Lightworth
I believe the self-congratulatory humility shindig here is a bit MISPLACED.

Could you explain why in an 'easy to understand' format?

Originally posted by karl 12
And I've always found the similarities in these two photographs interesting

Cheers

Yes, we are all in God's brain. We are God's imagination at work.

reply to post by karl 12


I thought about editing "self-congratulatory," so consider it de facto edited.

Yes, I've particularly recently wrestled with what level of usefulness there is or isn't in my posting on sites like these. I'll leave it to those who can relate to where I'm coming from to quietly absorb it.

Btw, Carl Sagan I find ultimately as interesting as SETI (the universe's biggest yawn). He was a good fiction writer and had some good ideas, but otherwise quite of the status quo persuasion.

Originally posted by ALLis0NE
Yes, we are all in God's brain. We are God's imagination at work.

Well I think the idea of 'the universe being one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively' does have some merit (although this may detract from the abrahamic opinion of god being 'outside' and not 'inside').
Also,results in M theory seem to indicating that the universe is the result of two other (parent) universes glancing off each other - whether this refutes long held assumptions about monotheism is another discussion altogether but its all very interesting nonetheless.
Cheers.

[edit on 02/10/08 by karl 12]