Last Saturday we went to a local small planetarium, at Oakland and watched a show name “The night sky”, basically nothing special about the show, you all might have seen similar shows in many other planetariums. One special thing of the show was, it was the last presentation of the guide after his couple of year long career. But at the end of it, we all came out of the show with an amazing feeling, putting it in word is beyond my capabilities…may be it’s the same feeling of taking a shower after travelling in Bombay local train at rush hours or you may call it enlightening…, whatever may be , but its not because of any technical gimmick or knowledge of any new discovery of recent days….
As usual, he has explained the night sky and few constellations but what made it so special to us was, how he has concluded, showing an Image from Voyager 1, 1990 and narrating a speech of Carl Sagan delivered May 11, 1996,
"We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every 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 in 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 the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. 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. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, 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 and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."
If you like the articles, please forward the website link to your other friends, if few more people read and likes it, my effort of writing will get some meaning.
Please don't forget to send your feedback to : partho.mridha@gmail.com