An Alien View Of Earth

[n2doc]

by NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE



February 12, 2010
This week marks the 20th anniversary of a photograph. It's a very dramatic photo, even though, at first glance, it's mostly dark and seems to show nothing at all.

But if you look closely, you can see a tiny speck of light. That speck is the Earth, seen from very, very, very far away.

Two decades ago, Candice Hansen-Koharcheck became the first person to ever see that speck, sitting in front of a computer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in California. "I was all alone, actually, that afternoon, in my office," she recalls.

Her office was dark. The window shades were drawn. She was searching through a database of images sent home by the Voyager 1 spacecraft, which at the time was nearly 4 billion miles away. "I knew the data was coming back," she says, "and I wanted to see how it had turned out."

Finally, she found it.

"It was just a little dot, about two pixels big, three pixels big," she says. "So not very large."

more:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=123614938&sc=fb&cc=fp

[atomic-fly]

1. Wow

I'm sure that aliens would be amazed and wonder all about us.
Maybe they have seen our model before and can send us some useful
advice to take care of this little jewel and each other...

The sad thing is that any contact would turn into a huge political/corporate/military
"what's in it for me" debate.

[tom_paine]

2. What would really be interesting is the "Alien Antropological Report"

"Virtually every society this species has ever produced has operated along the same lines: some 80-99.999% of humans perform tasks for the enrichment, aggrandizement and power of 0.001%-20% of their superiors within a given society.

"See Appendix 31A regarding percentage variabilities throughout species history, regarding various justifications of the various ideologies. Also see Appendix 31B regarding necessary size of the superior heirarchy or "aristocracy", to use the species' own term for it, depending on the justification selected in 31A.

"This species has two great evolutionary strengths, procreation and object modality (tool-using). These two characteristics have combined with the societal patterns described above to generate a species-wide short-term mentality that is ultimately self-destructive, as well as failing to extricate itself from biologically-driven "boom and bust' cycles, necessary for nearly all species if they are to achieve extraplanetary existance.

"Other aspects of the species are a distinct anti-intellectualism and antipathy to education, also driven in part by the overall species' societal pattern as described in the first paragraph..."

[qazplm]

5. you are assuming somehow

that we'd be the dunces of an intergalactic menagerie, in fact, we could be the apex, no way of knowing.

[Gman]

3. Veeger

Looking for the creator.

[troubledamerican]

4. That's where all the troublemakers are. Stay far away.

[never cry wolf]

6. Of course this thread demands Carl Sagan's comments on the picture

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

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 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.