"It's always darkest before the dawn. So if you're going to steal your neighbors newspaper that would be the time to do it."
Yup, I remember that quote, it's brilliant.Kashrlyyk said:Also a great quote: From Carl Sagan: The pale blue dot.martin said:" The amazing thing is that every atom from your body is from a star that exploded. And the atoms from your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It's really the most poetic things I know about physics. You, are all stardust, you couldn't be here if stars hadn't exploded. Because the elements: the carbon, the nitrogen, oxygen, iron all the things that matter for evolution weren't created at the beginning of time, they were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars. And the only way they can get into your body is if the stars are kind enough to explode. So forget Jesus, the stars died so you could be here."
-Lawrence Krauss
'It makes me want to run outside and ask people, HAVE YOU HEARD THIS?!'
He is talking about a picture of Earth from 7 million miles away:
From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of particular interest. But for us, it's different. 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.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Blue_Dot#Reflections_by_Sagan
A video with the above quote read by Carl Sagan:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p86BPM1GV8M