cosmos, carl sagan // humanity as told by uquiz free text answers, @judas-redeemed // @cheruib // the good place, gif by @trueloveistreacherous // rien ne va plus, margarita karapanou (tr. by karen emmerich) // everything everywhere all at once, gif by @rosalie-starfall // les misérables, victor hugo // unknown
"Evolution is a fact, not a theory. It really happened, and the fossil record and the molecular biology all confirm it. And yet, in this country, the United States, which is the leading scientific country in the world, we have people who are not only ignorant of science, but who are actively hostile to it and to the scientific method. And that is a serious problem, because science is not just a body of knowledge, it's a way of thinking. It's a way o skeptically interrogating the universe with a fine undersanding of human fallibility."
-- Carl Sagan
“The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.”
― Carl Sagan
Just think of all the countless petty squabbles and misunderstandings, of all the fervent hatreds, over so insignificant a thing as the direction and duration of a rocket engine firing.
Earth [Explained]
Transcript Under the Cut
[Carl Sagan stands in front of a black screen with a terribly tiny blue dot in the middle, raising his right hand back to indicate it.]
Carl: Look again at that dot. That's home. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives...
Carl: On a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
Off-panel voice: We know, Carl.
Caption: Carl Sagan was not making us feel better about how badly he'd messed up the low Earth orbit reentry burn.
Here we are, like mites on a plum. And the plum is this little planet and it goes around an insignificant local star, the sun.
And that star is on the obscure outskirts of an ordinary galaxy, the milky way, which contains 400 billion other stars.
And this galaxy is just one of something like 100 billion other galaxies that make up the universe.
And it is now beginning to look, this universe is one of an enormous number, maybe even an infinite number, of other closed off universes.
So the idea that we are central, that we are the reason there is a universe is… pathetic.
We have to simply come to grips with the real universe that we really live in. And if some of our myth and some of our religion is inconsistent with it, it's time to change the myth and the religion.