mosJessica Lorge
Cosmos
11 April 2012
The Pale Blue Dot Carl Sagan puts it perfectly, Earth which has and will consist of everything and everyone we will ever directly know is on this mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. How does one look at the world once we realize our position in regards to the whole universe? I thought there were so many people on this Earth but that everything that goes on in my one life was important....but once I saw how large the universe is and started considering my position I feel smaller and smaller. The Sun is one hundred and fifty million kilometers from Earth and the Sun is one million times the size of Earth. There is still light traveling to Earth set out by galaxies billions of years ago. There are approximately seven billion people on this planet. Do you feel small yet? For a long time not a lot of people considered how small the Earth was in comparison to the whole universe, and for those who did, they did not take into consideration the significance of our planet or lack thereof because the churches controlled basic human thought. The idea that human's on Earth were not at the center of the universe and the most important thing out there when we began discovering sunspots, irregular orbit patters of planets and moons, and that the planets did not revolve around the Earth. It's interesting how we as human's think that we are the basis for reality and that everything revolves around us. Why do we think that the natural world and universe is going to treat us any differently than any other rock floating in space. The dinosaurs were a dominant species and yet they had no control over their extinction. It is true we may be able to predict and prevent certain things but the fact of the matter is that those natural causes are still happening or at least would have happened if we were or weren't here. It is unbelievable how