Carl Sagan: Who Speaks For The Earth?

[RestoreGore]

Run time: 07:13 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cy1--3B_c4Q   Posted on YouTube: December 04, 2006 By YouTube Member: Views on YouTube: 0   Posted on DU: May 08, 2007 By DU Member: RestoreGore Views on DU: 1656

 
I learned so much from this great man, and miss his wisdom. I hope some of you enjoy watching this and listening to his insightful brilliant words.

[UndertheOcean]

1. Thank you

n/t

[RestoreGore]

2. You're welcome n/t

[Manifestor_of_Light]

3. I think the background muted horn music is Benjamin Britten's War Requiem.

I could be wrong. I have the whole thing on DVD and will see if I can find the music listing.

[RestoreGore]

5. You might be right

It sounds a bit like requiem aeternum from War Requiem, though I only remember that from listening to it in music courses I have taken over the years. If you find it please post here. I would like to know what music it is too, and actually that one would be very fitting.

[RestoreGore]

4. " An organism at war with itself is doomed"

Truer words were never spoken.

[RestoreGore]

6. The Carl Sagan Portal

http://www.carlsagan.com/

[RestoreGore]

7. Pale Blue Dot

From Wikipedia:

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

In a commencement address delivered May 11, 1996, Sagan related his thoughts on the deeper meaning of the photograph:<12>

“ We succeeded in taking that picture , 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.
”

Al Gore's 2006 documentary film, An Inconvenient Truth, featured the "Pale Blue Dot" photo at the end of the movie. Gore used it in his slide show to underline the need to stop global warming,<13> paraphrasing Carl Sagan with the statement, "That's all we've got".