NEW YEAR MESSAGE

[Guest guest]

Dear AAPN colleagues,

Maybe Dr Wedderburn will accommodate this

not very specifically Asian message for the new year. It is called

'REFLECTIONS ON A MOTE OF DUST' and is based on a photo of the planet Earth

from Voyager I. It is one of the most poignant and sublime pleas for

compassion and planetary preservation ever written. The author, Carl Sagan,

was one of the first people to espouse human rights for great apes. His book

COSMOS remains unmatched in intellectual breadth twenty five years since it

was first published. The accompanying television series was partially shot

in India. He was also at the forefront of anti whaling campaigns and as a

humanitarian was decades ahead of his time. The photograph can be viewed at

http://obs.nineplanets.org/psc/pbd.html.

Wishing everyone a happy and prosperous new year.

Kind regards,

 

Yours cordially,

http://obs.nineplanets.org/psc/pbd.html

 

Reflections on a Mote of Dust -- Carl

Sagan<http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap961226.html>(1934-1996)

 

We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at

it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you

ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The

aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions,

ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and

coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and

peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and

father, every 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 in

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

the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the

dot. 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. It is up to us. It's been said

that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building

experience. To my mind, 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 and compassionately with

one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home

we've ever known.

 

------------------------------

Excerpted from a commencement address delivered May 11, 1996. Dr. Sagan's

book Pale Blue

Dot<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0345376595/billarnett>expands

on these ideas.

Image<http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/PIAGenCatalogPage.pl?PIA00452>fro\

m

Voyager 1, 1990.

 

Alan Sill <alansill has created a nice

poster<http://obs.nineplanets.org/psc/guest/SaganPoster1.pdf>from the

above text and related photos.

 

Carl Sagan didn't live to see this image of

Earth<http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2003/05/22/>as seen from

Mars taken by Mars Global Surveyor in 2003. But he would have

loved it.

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[image: PSC Home] <http://obs.nineplanets.org/psc/psc.html>

html by Bill Arnett <http://bill.nineplanets.org/arnett.html>; last updated:

2004 Feb 26