Slashdot Mirror
Rosetta Comet Chaser Images Earth and Moon
An anonymous reader writes "Using its navigation cameras at the end of July, the comet chasing probe, Rosetta, captured this photograph while looking back towards Earth. From a distance of over 42 million miles, the Earth and Moon look faintly like two headlights on a deserted road. The larger image particularly seems to underscore why Carl Sagan reflected (PDF) on all the battles fought for what?--to become 'the momentary masters of a fraction of a tiny dot.'"
I've never gone for the "the earth is a tiny spoeck" point of view. What matters isn't absolute size (no giggles please) but but how important something is. To a parent that little bundle of joy is worth many times more than a volume of space even if it contains 10^11 galaxies each containing 10^11 stars. 'matters' isn't concept that comes from physics and no matter how big the universe turns out to be it takes nothing away from how big the Earth and its inhabitants are in our personal lives. I simply don't measure importance in meters (or even feet).
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
All I can say is read Carl Sagan' Pale Blue Dot. It is a brilliant book about our fragile little world, and why we need to take better care of it - or get off it.
The truth doesn't care how unpalatable you find it to be. That idea isn't meant to be pessimistic. On the contrary. It's motivational, because we all have a duty to be kind to each other, to educate ourselves, to strive for progress, to be good caretakers for this tiny world. Why? Because in the end, that's all that we have. Look at how small we are, and how small our planet is. Look at how big the universe is, and how barren it is. When we got our little planet, we really won the lottery.
No weapon in the arsenals of the world is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men.-Ronald Reagan
I think his real point was that we should move past our trivial quibblings and take in the majesty of the universe. Wars and disagreements are trivial compared to bringing knowledge to humanity and moving humanity out to the stars.
Moo.
42 million miles sounds like a lot, but that's not even half of an AU (1 AU is the distance from the Earth to the Sun). I'm not sure the point of my post, maybe it makes us seem more insignificant, or maybe not. I'm not sure. :)
The picture is obviously faked. I mean, come on, do you really think there's some cosmic version of the HOLLYWOOD sign bobbing along beside us? Or that in several hundred years of telescopic obersevation of the heavens no one would have noticed the enormous "Earth/Moon" signs?
We've been gimped I tell you!
-- MarkusQ
First thing i thought of?
Galaxy Song
Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour,
That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned,
A sun that is the source of all our power.
The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see
Are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour,
Of the galaxy we call the 'Milky Way'.
Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars.
It's a hundred thousand light years side to side.
It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick,
But out by us, it's just three thousand light years wide.
We're thirty thousand light years from galactic central point.
We go 'round every two hundred million years,
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe.
The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whizz
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know,
Twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth,
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth.