Forums » Smalltalk » Would you like to weep with joy and wonder?

Because this sure did the trick for me.

BEHOLD time lapse footage from the International Space Station.

I call first dibs on the first reply-- I didn't WEEP, but my jaw hit the floor and my eyes got as big as Earth itself.

This is bloody /EPIC/ and /AMAZING/. Done. That was so worth watching prior to sleepitimes.

Kim, how the Fluttershy did you stumble upon this? ...Stumbleupon?

Woah..... I dont know if I want to weep with joy or sadness...

Joy, I would imagine. I can't see why this would make you said, unless you sort of picture all the lights down there as mausoleums of souls burning away in the darkness and abyss that will inevitably become the earth in a few million years.

I dont know about a few million years Bones.. one can hope.

I just think it looks like the populated pieces of land are on fire.. or covered in molten lava. It's almost like its burning away the soul of the planet. When the soothing green light was there.. and the oceans, it was breathtakingly beautiful. But when it went to land and you see what looks like lava? It just looks to me like Earth did at the beginning of its creation. Except back then, it really WAS molten lava and not electricity..

This is the view from my window.

Or it will be when I have the window replaced with a giant TV screen that plays this on a constant loop.

That...is...amazing.

But, I agree. It looks like lava.

But honestly, I think it's really cool. I mean, the earth IS populated. Just imagine that the shine of people, of population and (in my eyes/religion) God's people, going all the way through to space.
We're pretty bright

We live in a vast, beautiful planet; while in many ways we devastate the world unintentionally, those lights are enough to steal anyone's breath. Now if only we could be so bright without stripping the blood from the earth and chopping down her children. =/

Regardless, it's amazing to think: Every dot there is a town, a city. From overhead, we just saw a billion people living their nighttime lives: playing games, reading books, chatting just like we are now, maybe making love or getting married. These things put life in perspective, and make you wonder: What are the odds this all happened by mechanical chance and development? It's so hard to believe that all of this was a moment of random evolution of planet, people, and everything else. And if it is sheer circumstance, rather than divine providence, we have to understand just how lucky we are.

It reminds me of my favorite quote, or at least one of a few by the late, great Sagan.

"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."