Friday, September 16, 2011

Who moved my wallpaper?

Kat did, replacing the desktop image in our classroom with a clever scene involving pious fish who can't imagine anyone but a God stooping to care for their fishbowl.

She's right, mine was a bit blurry. After all, it was taken from a distance of 3.7 billion miles.

It's really Carl Sagan's adjoining text, though, more than the image of a miniscule fraction of a dot, that's meant to convey clarity. So let me restore my sense of perspective, mine and Matthew Beckler's, here and now.
From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any 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... Pale Blue Dot

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