After a day like today it's hard to remember we're all on the Pale Blue Dot.

[sir pball]

28 years ago the Voyager probe took a photo of Earth from 3,700,000,000 miles away. I won't point us out.



The inimitable Carl Sagan had this to say about the photo..

...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.

[DFW]

1. Sagan was right, of course, but then, again....

So was Tip O'Neill...........

[sir pball]

2. True, even though I barely get that

Being 38, some early Reagan references miss me.

At least,.no matter what, history (and entropy for that matter) will eventually prove Sagan right...we all live and die here, no matter what.

[DFW]

4. Yeah, we old geezers need to remember that

My daughters were born during the Reagan presidency, so they remember none of it. They were 6 and 4 when my wife and I took one of our "childless" weekends in Hamburg. We live in a small, very tight community, where we could all bring our kids to their schoolmates' homes for a few days if the parents wanted to have a weekend to themselves. We even all give copies of our house keys to each other for stuff like plant watering or pet feeding when one is on vacation.

One weekend, my wife and I took off early (Thursday). That was November 9, 1989. In our hotel in Hamburg, we watched the evening news, and turned to each other mouths agape in astonishment. As in, "did you just hear what I think I heard?" The history of the world had just changed direction, and we were in the middle of it. There would be no more killings at the Berlin Wall, and the motion-detector-activated machine guns along the border would be dismantled. Hamburg, 30 miles from the East German border, was flooded the next morning with East Germans getting their first look at the west. It was as if they had just landed on another planet where, by dumb luck, everyone just happened to speak German.

[AJT]

3. A brilliant man.