Pale blue dot - Earth captured in rare photograph from Saturn spacecraft Cassini
NB - 'Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of "world history," but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die. One might invent such a fable, and yet he still would not have adequately illustrated how miserable, how shadowy and transient, how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature. There were eternities during which it did not exist. And when it is all over with the human intellect, nothing will have happened..' (Friedrich Nietzsche)
And we still think we need nationalism! and that religious and national communities need atom bombs to kill one another! Truly we humans are masters of self deception -DS
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A robotic space probe nearly 900m miles (1.5bn kilometres) from Earth has turned its gaze away from Saturn and its entourage of moons to take a rare picture of its home planet. The resulting image shows Earth as a very small, blue-tinged dot – paler and tinier than in other photos – overshadowed by the giant Saturn's rings in foreground.
"We can't see individual continents or people in this portrait of Earth, but this pale blue dot is a succinct summary of who we were on July 19," Linda Spilker, Cassini spacecraft lead scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said in a statement.
Cassini took the picture on Friday, the same day NASA's Mercury-orbiting Messenger probe also photographed Earth. In that picture, Earth and the moon take up less than a pixel, but appear large because they are overexposed. "That images of our planet have been acquired on a single day from two distant solar system outposts reminds us of this nation's stunning technical accomplishments in planetary exploration," Messnger lead scientist Sean Solomon, with Columbia University in New York, said in a statement. "The whole event underscores for me our 'coming of age' as planetary explorers," said astronomer Carolyn Porco, who oversees the Cassini imaging team at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado... Usually, spacecraft in the far reaches of the solar system don't look back towards Earth to avoid damaging their instruments by direct sunlight. Last week, the sun was temporarily blocked relative to Cassini's line of sight, allowing the pictures to be taken.
Dr Porco hopes the picture will be reminiscent of the famous "Pale Blue Dot" image captured by the Voyager-1 probe in 1990. That was a picture she helped organise with the astronomer and popular science writer Carl Sagan. He memorably described the Earth as looking like a "mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam", such was its apparent insignificance in the vastness of space.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-23373821
NB: A view of the human predicament different from Nietzsche's may be read in Hans Jonas’s essay Gnosticism, existentialism and nihilism, from which here is an extract:
'There is no
overlooking one cardinal difference between
the gnostic and the existentialist nihilism: Gnostic man is thrown into
an antagonistic, antidivine, and therefore antihuman nature, modern man into
an indifferent one. Only the latter case
represents the absolute vacuum, the really bottomless pit. In the gnostic conception
the hostile, the demonic, is still anthropomorphic, familiar even in its
foreignness, and the contrast itself gives direction to existence – a negative
direction, to be sure, but one that has behind it the sanction of the negative
transcendence to which the positivity of the world is the positive counterpart.
Not even this antagonistic quality is granted to the indifferent Nature of
modern science, from that nature no direction at all can be elicited...This
makes modern nihilism infinitely more radical and more desperate than gnostic
nihilism ever could be for all its panic terror of the world and its defiant
contempt of its laws. That nature does not care, one way or the other, is the
true abyss. That only man cares, in his finitude facing nothing but death,
alone in his contingency and the objective meaninglessness of his projected
meanings, is a truly unprecedented situation’ - From Hans
Jonas’s essay on Gnosticism, existentialism and nihilism, p 233 in The Phenomenon
of Life
