Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot speech hits different depending on what you’ve been consuming lately.
It can be quite inspiring, or quite depressing
Every single thing experienced by all 100ish billion humans who ever lived, all their highs and lows, all the people they knew, all their hopes and dreams… Could all be destroyed at the speed of light, and we would never have any way to see it coming, or stop it even if we did.
An asteroid could make the planet inhospitable to all but tiny organisms. A Gamma ray burst could pop off dozens of lightyears away. Coronal mass ejection burns the atmosphere. Rogue planet/black hole. False Vacuum decay could destroy baryonic matter.
Your entire life will be experienced, you live and die, and the universe at large will never even notice.
Some people find that depressing. I find it a little comforting. If nothing we do matters, we have to figure out how to make things matter to us. I uh… I’m still working on that last bit… But it’s a nice thought to me.
We are the rarest form of matter: thinking matter. You have value.
(from a collectible point of view)
…but his death had meaning, because he royally things up for the authority that caused the circumstances in which he died. In this, I hope we can be more like him than different, too.
This actually happened at my parents’ house when I was a kid. Caused a huge power surge in the house. It destroyed a lot of electronics. Thousands of dollars in damage.
Happened at my folks house in the breaker from the mains. Mr. Rodent’s carbon corpse acted as an electrode and blew a hole through the box half an inch in diameter. This happened Christmas Eve. With replacing the panel and making an appointment with the power company to inspect and reconnect, we didn’t get power back for over 3 weeks. Since they live on a well, and the booster pump needs electricity to run, we had to draw water from the storage tank a bucket at a time.
This always bums me out when I see it.
I’m soft I guess.
i see myself in the mouse, and it gives me a kind of cosmic wonder. there’s a certain comfort to be found in realizing that we’re all just scurrying around and scratching at the walls of a world we’ll never fully understand, being struck down by forces we’ll never fully control.
my brain trends towards “you’re gonna ruin it!” type anxieties. it really calms me down to remember that when you zoom out far enough, there’s nothing there to ruin.
Though unwittingly, they attempted to disrupt the grand order, and for that they paid dearly!
Mice. The word is mice.
Mousopodes.
Pow right in the ventricle
Somehow I find this quite calming
