Remember: Plants grow by the inch but die by the foot. Please stay on trail
As seen on a BLM sign at Yaquina Head lighthouse near Newport, OR. Photo is from Klamath River outlook in Northern California.
Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live. Code for readability.
-John Woods
I love the words of Carl Sagan. He has an uncanny and somewhat magical ability to capture a small part of the beauty and wonder of the cosmos. I recently rediscovered this well made video by Michael Marantz which contains audio excerpts of Sagan reading The Pale Blue Dot, specifically sections about humanity's great potential.
"We humans are capable of greatness," Sagan says. Every time I hear these words I get goosebumps. This poetic dispatch challenges us all to consider our current state of affairs and reset our course. Like Sagan, I believe that humanity is capable of truly great feats and exploration. However, this is something that humanity is capable of, not single governments, agencies, countries, or corporations. For humanity to realize its great potential we must understand that we are all members of the same family - the same species - and work together toward the betterment of humanity. I only hope that the world wakes up before we lose our opportunity.
Transcript of speech:
We were hunters and foragers.
The frontier was everywhere.
We were bounded only by the Earth, and the ocean, and the sky. The open road still softly calls.
Our little terraquious globe as the madhouse of those hundred thousand millions of worlds.
We, who cannot even put our own planetary home in order, riven with rivalries and hatreds; Are we to venture out into space?
By the time we're ready to settle even the nearest of other planetary systems, we will have changed. The simple passage of so many generations will have changed us. Necessity will have changed us. We're… an adaptable species.
It will not be we who reach Alpha Centauri and the other nearby stars. It will be a species very like us, but with more of our strengths, and fewer of our weaknesses. More confident, farseeing, capable, and prudent. For all our failings, despite our limitations and fallibilities, we humans are capable of greatness.
What new wonders, undreamt of in our time, will we have wrought in another generation? And another? How far will our nomadic species have wandered by the end of the next century? And the next millennium? Our remote descendants, safely arrayed on many worlds through the solar system and beyond, will be unified by their common heritage, by their regard for their home planet, and by the knowledge that whatever other life may be, the only humans in all the universe come from Earth.
They will gaze up, and strain to find the blue dot in their skies. They will marvel at how vulnerable the repository of all our potential once was. How perilous, our infancy. How humble, our beginnings. How many rivers we had to cross before we found our way.
-Carl Sagan
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
-Robert Frost
"One of the great revelations of the age of space exploration is the image of the earth finite and lonely, somehow vulnerable, bearing the entire human species through the oceans of space and time."
-Carl Sagan
"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."
-Carl Sagan
