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#sagan

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earthling

“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

#quotes
#Earth
#Sagan

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The Krononaut Moon Project 🌑

4-min clip from the 1997 Robert Zemeckis #film 'Contact' based on the 1985 #novel by Carl Sagan.

Dr. Ellie Arroway (Jody Foster) enters the great #gyroscopic #SpaceTime #machine, opening up a #wormhole #portal. #Gyroscope devices have factored heavily in #SciFi #movies & #books, going all the way back to #HGWells & #AlfredJarry, pre-1900.

🔗 youtube.com/watch?v=scBY3cVyey
🔗 Wikipedia.org/wiki/Contact_(19

YouTubeContact Space Travel (HD)By Kravennn
#Time#Timelesness#TimeTravel
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GermanZero Hamburg

Carl #Sagan's eloquent rant against car-dominance (from #PaleBlueDot) - #fuckcars (／u／cahitmetekid)

I was just reading Sagan's Pale Blue Dot and in Chapter 5 he creates this hypothetical scenario where an alien spaceship discovers our planet and starts observing to understand if there's any life or intelligence. I thought you lot would appreciate his brilliant criticism of our car-centric infrastructure:

"When you examine the Earth at about 100-meter resolution, everything changes. The planet is revealed to be covered with straight lines, squares, rectangles, circles sometimes huddling along river banks or nestling on the lower slopes of mountains, sometimes stretching over plains, but rarely in deserts or high mountains, and absolutely never in the oceans. Their regularity, complexity, and distribution would be hard to explain except by life and intelligence, although a deeper understanding of function and purpose might be elusive. Perhaps you would conclude only that the dominant life-forms have a simultaneous passion for territoriality and Euclidean geometry. At this resolution you could not see them, much less know them.

Many of the devegetated smudges are revealed to have an underlying checkerboard geometry. These are the planets cities. Over much of the landscape, and not just in the cities, there is a profusion of straight lines, squares, rectangles, circles. The dark smudges of the cities are revealed to be highly geometrized, with only a few patches of vegetation—themselves with highly regular boundaries—left intact. There are occasional triangles, and in one city there is even a pentagon.

When you take pictures at a meter resolution or better, you find that the crisscrossing straight lines within the cities and the long straight lines that join them with other cities are filled with streamlined, multicolored beings a few meters in length, politely running one behind the other, in long, slow orderly procession. They are very patient. One stream of beings stops so another stream can continue at right angles. Periodically, the favor is returned. At night, they turn on two bright lights in front so they can see where they're going. Some, a privileged few, go into little houses when their workday is done and retire for the night. Most are homeless and sleep in the streets.

At last! You've detected the source of all the technology. the dominant life-forms on the planet. The streets of the cities and the roadways of the countryside are evidently built for their benefit. You might believe that you were really beginning to understand life on Earth. And perhaps you'd be right.

If the resolution improved just a little further, you'd discover tiny parasites that occasionally enter and exit the dominant organisms. They play some deeper role, though, because a stationary dominant organism will often start up again just after it's reinfected by a parasite, and stop again just before the parasite is expelled. This is puzzling. But no one said life on Earth would be easy to understand." (Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, pp. 62-63).

reddit.com/r/fuckcars/comments

#VirusAuto#CarBrain#Autokorrektur
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Chao-c'

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...

The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”

- Carl #Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark - 1995

#carlsagan
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