Relevant

[Rakesh Nath]

All

I thought this was relevant
http://youtu.be/wupToqz1e2g

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Thanks and Regards
Rakesh Nath
"It is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring."
Carl Sagan

[keerthi kiran]

Hi,
Rather than just saying relevant, you can give some info on the video... Otherwise, it will be difficult to know whether it is a valid mail or spam sent by a compromised account.

Regards,
Keerthi

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[Arun Venkataswamy]

On Fri, Feb 17, 2012 at 4:48 AM, Rakesh Nath <rak...@gmail.com> wrote:

All

I thought this was relevant
http://youtu.be/wupToqz1e2g

The "Pale blue dot"

It's a humbling experience each time I read that incredible paragraph by Carl Sagan.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Blue_Dot

Copied verbatim from Wikipedia:

Reflections by Sagan

In his book Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, the astronomer Carl Sagan related his thoughts on a deeper meaning of the photograph:^[14]

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.

—Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, p. 6

Regards,

Arun

[Gratis Makan]

Brilliant! The man was a poet :)

[Rakesh Nath]

Point taken

On 02/17/2012 01:27 AM, keerthi kiran wrote:
> Hi,
> Rather than just saying relevant, you can give some info on the
> video... Otherwise, it will be difficult to know whether it is a valid
> mail or spam sent by a compromised account.
>
> Regards,
> Keerthi

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