Insights

Readings - Science, philosophy, history, etc.

The Universe.

Sagan

Carl

my music

Great Minds

Carl Sagan - A Glorious Dawn

<a href="http://dreaminginthevoid.blogspot.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Dreaming in the Void blog</a> | <a href="http://soundcloud.com/dreaminginthevoid" target="_blank">Other sounds</a>

George Carlin on the Universe

Symphony Of Science - A Glorious Dawn Carl Sagan Ft. Stephen Hawking (Fortheye Remix)

Robert Anton Wilson on Social Conditioning and Reality Police

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PN5JJDh78I

This excerpt from A Pale Blue Dot was inspired by an image taken, at Carl Sagan's suggestion, by Voyager 1 on February 14, 1990 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pale_Blue_Dot.png). As the spacecraft left our planetary neighborhood 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 kilometers (4 billion miles) away, and approximately 32 degrees above the ecliptic plane, when it captured this portrait of our world. Caught in the center 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.

Music: Ludovico Einaudi with a track titled, very fittingly, "The Earth Prelude"

For more, visit www.sagantime.com

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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.

-- Carl Sagan (1934-1996)

Carl Sagan - You Are Here (Pale Blue Dot) [Sagan Time]

A poem I wrote yesterday and decided to record. Today I figured I'd add some music and quotes from two of my favorite philosophers Terence McKenna and RAW

...Make Of It What You Wish... Ft. Terence McKenna & Robert Anton Wilson

"When you are perfectly free to feel stuck or not stuck, then you're unstuck."

Alan Watts - Disturbing Confusions Of The Mind

<a href="http://dreaminginthevoid.blogspot.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">DREAMING IN THE VOID BLOG</a> | <a href="http://soundcloud.com/dreaminginthevoid" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Other sounds</a>

Source:
http://youtu.be/wupToqz1e2g

Carl Sagan - The Pale Blue Dot

Carl Sagan - A Reassuring Fable

Carl Sagan - To The Sky

Jaron Lanier - The Tragic Death Of Alan Turing

Howard Zinn -  The Stupidity Of War

Howard Zinn - Patriotism

This file contains a reading from Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World: Science as Candle in the Dark.

The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan, Chapter One

Neil deGrasse Tyson - Be Yourself

Lawrence Krauss - Our Godless Universe Is Precious

THE SAGAN SERIES (part 2) - Life Looks for Life

THE SAGAN SERIES (part 9) - The Humans

The Sagan Series (part 1) - The Frontier Is Everywhere

<a href="http://dreaminginthevoid.blogspot.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">DREAMING IN THE VOID BLOG</a> | <a href="http://soundcloud.com/dreaminginthevoid" target="_blank">Other sounds</a>

Sources:
http://youtu.be/4E-_DdX8Ke0

Carl Sagan - A Reassuring Fable

DreamsIn8Bit