THE PALE BLUE DOT

A Pale Blue Dot

This excerpt from Sagan's book Pale Blue Dot was inspired by an image taken, at Sagan's suggestion, by Voyager 1 on February 14, 1990. As the spacecraft left our planetary neighbourhood for the fringes of the solar system, engineers turned it around for one last look at its home planet. Voyager 1 was about 6.4 billion kilometres (4 billion miles) away, and approximately 32 degrees above the ecliptic plane, when it captured this portrait of our world. Caught in the centre of scattered light rays (a result of taking the picture so close to the Sun), Earth appears as a tiny point of light, a crescent only 0.12 pixel in size.

“Look again at 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 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. 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.
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.” ― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

MY #SENECTITUDE PLANS

To roam like a meanderer with a Nikon D500, a diary, a parker, my comfortable sleepers and a bag full of eatables..No destination to reach, No decided place to visit. Just to follow the tracks and realise what everything comes along no matter if it is a barren land or any aristocratic palace which signifies the prodigious Indian erudition.. and nothing much..

So the footsteps took me here..@ the famous #City_palace of the beautiful Udaipur.. The gigantic royality of Indian kings and their lives was a subject of attraction since birth as being Brahmin by paternal pedigree we have received honour of being purohits of Maharaja's court..
Each and every monument, entire palace area..the gilded entrance, the royal monuments, those antique and beautiful Windows, the incredible carvings over rooftops, the giant pools, unique Silver and Gold articles, the big lawns, the most elegant outlooks of lake #pichhola #fateh_sagar, those perfect gardens, the super duper exhibition of armours, weapons, the then used utensils, those king sized bed of kings , tables, chairs, Hifi courtrooms, the beautiful descriptions of their luxurious lifestyles, their greatness, their valor.. the glorific history, the proud present, the immortal future..
Indeed fortunate to be born in this motherland.. privileged to be able to witness an entire history.. to which we as Indians belong.