“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.”
- Carl Sagan
Thirty years ago today the first episode of Sailor Moon was aired, so I thought I’d celebrate it with a redraw of a screenshot from the 90s anime. Mentioning Carl Sagan on an image of Serenity admiring the Earth seemed poetic to me and suited to times like these.
The California wildfires have burned through so much acreage in the Golden State that the smoke is visible from space.
NASA tweeted a handful of photos of the smoke plume drifting over the Pacific Ocean on Wednesday.
The NASA photos were taken from the International Space Station, and show heavy clouds of smoke billowing from California’s mountainous terrain.
A major Santa Ana weather event with wind gusts between 70 and 80 mph, and low relative humidity are to blame for the Skirball fire, which is threatening Los Angeles’ affluent Bel Air neighborhood, officials said.
The four fires are currently blazing through thousands of acres in California, forcing residents to evacuate. Each of the fires was at just 5 percent containment or below as of Wednesday afternoon.
California Gov. Jerry Brown has declared a state of emergency in Ventura and Los Angeles counties. (GMA)
Photos from top: NASA/AFP, @AstroKomrade/NASA/Handout via Reuters (3), NASA
Perhaps the most-terrifying space photograph around.
Astronaut Bruce McCandless II floats untethered away from the safety of the space shuttle, with nothing but his Manned Maneuvering Unit keeping him alive. The first person in history to do so.
![photos-of-space:Apollo 15 Earthrise [2000x3996]](https://64.media.tumblr.com/d37bf066cc251e90ff861db1b86ea64f/tumblr_p4k8qwrmEv1ve10t6o1_1280.jpg "photos-of-space:Apollo 15 Earthrise [2000x3996]")
