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Writer, drinker, Manchester City fan, evolver of ideas, and trainee Renaissance man. I’m on a quest for original thought and the perfect Martini. I have no heroes and I only regret things I've done, not things I haven't. I'm fascinated by human intelligence, the mind and evolution.

The universe is so big and so old that it’s a privilege to be alive on this planet here and now, it is our duty to share our thoughts and ideas.

If you try to picture yourself in the universe, between the very big and the very small you would have to place yourself nearer the smaller things. See it as an out of body exercise, try to visualise yourself in the three dimensional environment.

The universe is fucking big, so big we have great difficulty in imagining the space it encompasses, but if you really try I’m sure you will do it. If you take into account the vast amounts of time and space you have just visualised, what portion of that visualisation is you and your life ? It’s a fucking small amount I can tell you.

Once you have come to terms with the fact that you are so small and have such a brief time to make your life enjoyable, the rest is a piece of piss. Sit back in your chair, take a fucking big slug of whatever it is you drink, take a big deep breath and thank the star that spawned you that you have the good fortune to be alive on this amazing world. Bollocks to the day-to-day worries and stresses, bollocks to all the people who give you shit. Fuck bills and deadlines and responsibility and all the other crap that punctuates your everyday life. They are all irrelevancies, to be burned away by the sheer joy of living.

Philosophy

Our Home

Carl Sagan

image

Our Home

Carl Sagan

On the 14th of February 1990 Carl Sagan asked Voyager 1 to turn towards Earth and take a photograph. Voyager was 4 billion miles away and the Earth was just 0.12 pixels of the image.

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again 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.

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 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 this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner.

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.

The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate.

Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. 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 with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."

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