We were wanderers from the beginning. We knew every stand of tree for a hundred miles. When the fruits or nuts were ripe, we were there. We followed the herds in their annual migrations. We rejoiced in fresh meat. Through stealth, feint, ambush, and main-force assault, a few of us cooperating accomplished what many of us, each hunting alone, could not. We depended on one another. Making it on our own was as ludicrous to imagine as was settling down. Working together, we protected our children from the lions and the hyenas. We taught them the skills they would need. And the tools. Then, as now, technology was the key to our survival. When the drought was prolonged, or when an unsettling chill lingered in the summer air, our group moved on sometimes to unknown lands. We sought a better place. And when we couldn't get on with the others in our little nomadic band, we left to find a more friendly bunch somewhere else. We could always begin again. For 99.9% of the time since our species came to be, we were hunters and foragers, wanderers on the savannahs and the steppes. There were no border guards then, no customs officials. The frontier was everywhere. We were bounded only by the Earth and the ocean and the sky—plus occasional grumpy neighbors. When the climate was congenial, though, when the food was plentiful, we were willing to stay put. Unadventurous. Overweight. Careless. In the last ten thousand years—an instant in our long history we've abandoned the nomadic life. We've domesticated the plants and animals. Why chase the food when you can make it come to you? For all its material advantages, the sedentary life has left us edgy, unfulfilled. Even after 400 generations in villages and cities, we haven't forgotten. The open road still softly calls, like a nearly forgotten song of childhood. We invest far-off places with a certain romance. This appeal, I suspect, has been meticulously crafted by natural selection as an essential element in our survival. Long summers, mild winters, rich harvests, plentiful game—none of them lasts forever. It is beyond our powers to predict the future. Catastrophic events have a way of sneaking up on us, of catching us unaware. Your own life, or your band's, or even your species' might be owed to a restless few—drawn, by a craving they can hardly articulate or understand, to undiscovered lands and new worlds. Herman Melville, in Moby Dick, spoke for wanderers in all epochs and meridians: he said "I am tormented with an everlasting itch" "for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas." To the ancient Greeks and Romans, the known world comprised Europe and an attenuated Asia and Africa, all surrounded by an impassable World Ocean. Travelers might encounter inferior beings called barbarians or superior beings called gods. Every tree had its dryad, every district its legendary hero. But there were not very many gods, at least at first, perhaps only a few dozen. They lived on mountains, under the Earth, in the sea, or up there in the sky. They sent messages to people, intervened in human affairs, and interbred with us. As time passed, as the human exploratory capacity hit its stride, there were surprises: Barbarians could be fully as clever as Greeks and Romans. Africa and Asia were larger than anyone had guessed. The World Ocean was not impassable. There were Antipodes. Three new continents existed had been settled by Asians and ages past and the news had never reached Europe Also the gods were disappointingly hard to find. The first large-scale human migration from the Old World to the New happened during the last ice age, about 11,500 years ago, when the growing polar ice caps shallowed the oceans and made it possible to walk on dry land from Siberia to Alaska. A thousand years later, we were in Tierra del Fuego, the southern tip of South America. Long before Columbus, Indonesian argonauts in outrigger canoes explored the western Pacific; people from Borneo settled Madagascar; Egyptians and Libyans circumnavigated Africa; and a great fleet of oceangoing junks from Ming Dynasty China crisscrossed the Indian Ocean, established a base in Zanzibar, rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and entered the Atlantic Ocean. In the 15th through 17th centuries, European sailing ships discovered new continents (new, at any rate, to Europeans) and circumnavigated the planet. In the 18th and 19th centuries, American and Russian explorers, traders, and settlers raced west and east across two vast continents to the Pacific. This zest to explore and exploit, however thoughtless its agents may have been, has clear survival value. It is not restricted to any one nation or ethnic group. It is an endowment that all members of the human species hold in common. Since we first emerged a few million years ago in East Africa We've meandered our way around the planet there are now people on every continent and the remotest islands from pole to pole From mount everest to the Dead Sea on the ocean bottoms and even in residents 200 miles up Humans like the gods of Old living in the sky These days there seems to be nowhere left to explore at Leith on the land area of the Earth Victims of their very success the explorer is now pretty much stay home late in the 19th Century Live gruber was growing up in Central Europe in an obscure town in the immense Polyglots ancient Austro-Hungarian Empire His father sold fish 20 good The times were often hard as a young man, the only honest employment live could find was carrying people across the nearby River bug The customer male, or female would mount on lives back In his prized boots the tools of his trade. He [would] wait out in a shallow stretch of the river and Deliver his passenger to the opposite Bank Sometimes the water reached his waist There were no bridges here. No Ferry boats Horses might have served the purpose, but they had other uses That left live and a few other young men like they had no other uses no other work was available They would lounge about the Riverbank calling out their prices boasting to potential customers about the superiority of their drayage They hired themselves out like four-footed animals My grandfather was a beast of burden I Don't think that in all his young manhood live adventured more than 100 kilometers [from] his little hometown of sass off but then In 1904 he suddenly ran away to the [new] [world] To avoid a murder rap according to one family legend He left his young wife behind How different from his tiny backwater hamlet the great German port cities must have seemed? How vast the Ocean how strange the Lofty skyscrapers and endless hubbub of his new land? We know nothing of his crossing but have found the ship's manifest for the Journey undertaken later by his wife Kaya Joining [libe] after he had saved enough [to] bring her over. She Travelled in the cheapest class on the Batavia [Fso] of [Hamburg] registered There's something heartbreaking litres about the document Can she read her right? No Can she speak English? No, how much money does she have I? Can imagine her vulnerability and her shame as she replies one daughter? She disembarked in New York was reunited with live lived just long enough to give birth to my mother and her sister and then died from complications of childbirth in those Few Years in America her name had sometimes been anglicized to Clara [a] Quarter century [later] my mother named her own firstborn a son after the mother she never knew Our distant ancestors watching the stars noted five that did more than just rise and set in stolid procession as the so called fixed stars did these five had a Curious and complex motion over the months they seemed to wander slowly among the stars sometimes they did loops Today we call them planets the Greek word for wanderers it was I imagine a peculiarities our ancestors could relate to We know now that the planets and not stars, but [other] worlds? gravitationally lashed to the sun Just as the exploration of the Earth was being completed. We began to recognize it as one world among an uncounted multitude of others Circling the sun or orbiting the other stars that make up the milky way Galaxy Our planet and our solar system are surrounded [by] a new world ocean the depths of space It is no more impassable than the last Maybe it's a little early. Maybe the time is not quite yet, but those are the worlds promising Untold opportunities Beckon in the last few decades the United States and the former [soviet] Union have accomplished something stunning and Historic the close-up examination of all those points of light from Mercury to [center] That moved our ancestors to wonder and to science since the advent of successful interplanetary flight in 1962 our Machines have flown by or orbited or landed on more than 70 new works We have wandered among the [wanderer] We have found vast volcanic eminences that dwarf the highest mountain on Earth ancient River valleys on two planets enigmatically one [to] cold and the other too hot for running water a Giant Planet with an interior of Liquid metallic, hydrogen Into which a thousand Earths would fit homes that have melted a Cloud covered place with an atmosphere of Corrosive acids were even the high plateaus are above the melting point of Lid Ancient surfaces on which faithful record of the violent formation of the solar system is engraved refugee ice [world's] from the trends plutonium depths exquisitely patterned ring systems marking the Subtle harmonies of Gravity and A world surrounded by clouds of complex organic molecules like those that in the earliest history of our planet, Led to the origin of life Silently they orbit the sun waiting We have uncovered wonders undreamt by our ancestors who first speculated on the nature of those wandering lights in the night sky? We have proved the origins of our planet and [ourselves] By discovering what else is possible? By coming face to face with alternative fates of worlds more or less like our own. We have begun to better understand the Earth Every one of those worlds is lovely and instructive, but so far as we know they are also [every] [one] Desolate and Barren out there. There are no better places so far at least during the viking robotic missions beginning in july 1976 In a certain sense I spent a year on Mars. [I] Examined the boulders and sand Dunes the sky red even at high noon The ancient River Valleys the soaring Volcanic Mountain [was] the Fierce wind erosion the laminated Polar Terrain the two Dark Potato-shaped Moons But the ones no life not a cricket to a blade of grass or [even] so far as we can tell for sure a micro life Is a comparative rarity? You can survey dozens of worlds and find that and only one of them. There's life, arise and evolve and persist even oh Having in all their lives till then crust nothing wider than a river Live [band], Hiya graduated to crossing oceans They had one great advantage on the other side of the waters they would be Invested without landish customs, it's true other human beings Speaking their language and sharing at least some of their values even people to whom they were closely related In our time we've crossed the solar system and sent [four] ships to the stars neptune lies a million times further from Earth Than New York City is from the banks of the River bug But there are no distant relatives no unions and apparently no life waiting for us on those other worlds No letters conveyed by recent Emma [grey's] help us to understand the new land only digital Data transmitted at the speed of light by unfeeling precise robot emissaries They tell us That these new worlds are not much like home But we continued to search for inhabitants. We can't help it life looks for life No one on Earth not the richest among us can afford the passage so we can't pick up and leave [for] Mars or titan on a whim, or Because we're bored or out of work or drafted into the army or oppressed or because justly or unjustly we've been accused of a crime It does not seem to be sufficient short-term profit to motivate private industry if we humans ever go to those worlds Then it will be because a nation or a consortium of them believes it to be to its advantage or to the advantage of the human species Just now There are a great many matters that are pressing in on us that compete for the money it takes to send people to other worlds Should we solve those problems first? Or are they a reason for going? we as the ancient mythmakers knew [where] children equally of the earth and the sky in our tenure on this planet we've accumulated dangerous evolutionary baggage propensity for aggression ritual submission to leaders hostility to Outsiders all of which puts our survival in some doubt We've also acquired compassion for others love for our children [a] desire to learn from history and experience And a great soaring passionate intelligence the clear tools for our continued survival and prosperity Which aspects of our nature will prevail is uncertain? Particularly when our visions and prospects are bound to one small part of the small planet But up there in the cosmos and inescapable perspective awaits National Boundaries are not evident when we view the Earth from space Fanatic ethnic or religious or national identifications are a little difficult to support when we see our planet as a fragile blue crescent? fading to become an inconspicuous point of light against the best Citadel of the Stars you you you The Spacecraft was a long way from home speeding away from the sun at 40,000 miles an hour, but in early February of 1990 it was overtaken by an urgent message from Earth Obediently it turned its cameras back toward the now distant planets slowing its scan platform from one spot in the sky to another it snapped 60 pictures and Stored them in digital form on its tape recorder Then slowly in March April, and May it radioed the Data back to Earth Each image was composed of 640 thousand pixels The Spacecraft was 3.7 billion miles away from Earth so far away that [it] took each pixel five and a half hours Traveling at the speed of light to reach us The pictures might have been returned earlier, but the big radio telescopes in California, Spain and Australia That receive these whispers from the edge of the solar system had responsibilities to other ships that ply the sea of space among them Magellan [bound] for venus and Galileo on its tortuous passage to Jupiter Voyager [1] was so high above the ecliptic plane because in 1981 it had made a close pass by titan the giant moon of Saturn Its sister ship voyager 2 was dispatched on a different trajectory Within the equipted plane and so she was able to perform her celebrated explorations of uranus and neptune the two Voyager Robots have explored four planets and nearly 60 moons They are triumphs of human engineering and one of the glories [of] the American space program They will be in the history [books] when much else about our time is forgotten The voyagers were guaranteed to work only until the saturn encounter I thought it might be a good idea. Just after saturn to have him take one last glance homeward From Saturn I knew the earth would appear too small for voyager to make out any detail Our planet would be just a point of light too lonely pixel Hardly distinguishable from the many other points of light voyager would see nearby planets far-off suns mariners had painstakingly mapped the coastlines of contacts Geographers had translated these findings into charts and globes photographs of tiny Patches of the Earth had been obtained first by balloons and aircraft then by Rockets in Brief ballistic flight and at last by orbiting Spacecraft Giving a perspective like the one you achieved, but positioning your eyeball about an inch above a large globe while almost everyone has taught that the earth is a sphere with all of us somehow glued to it by Gravity the [reality] [of] our circumstance did not really begin to sink in until the famous frame filling apollo photograph of the Lord The one taken by the apollo 17 astronauts on the last Journey of Humans to the moon It has become a kind of icon of our age There's antarctica at what Americans and Europeans so readily regard as the bottom and Then all of Africa's stretching up above it. You can see, Ethiopia, Tanzania and Kenya Where the earliest humans lived? At top right of Saudi Arabia and what Europeans [call] the near East? Just barely peaking out at the top is the mediterranean sea around which so much of our global civilization emerged You can make out the blue of the ocean the yellow red of the Sahara and the Arabian Desert the Brown Green of Forest and Grassland and Yet there is no sign of humans in this picture not our reworking of the Earth's surface Not our [machine's] not [ourselves] We are too small and our state craft is too feeble to [be] seen by a spacecraft between the Earth and the Moon From this vantage point our obsession with nationalism is nowhere in Evidence the Apollo pictures of the Whole Earth Conveyed to multitudes Something well known to astronomers on the scale of worlds to say nothing of stars or galaxies Humans are inconsequential [a] thin film of life on an obscure and solitary lump of Rock and Metal It seemed to me that another picture of the Earth this one taken from a hundred thousand times farther away Might help in the continuing process of revealing to [ourselves] our true circumstance and condition It had been well understood by the scientists and philosophers of classical antiquity [that] [he] refusing your point in a vast Encompassing cosmos, but no one had ever seen it as such He was a first chance and perhaps also our last for decades to come Many [and] Nasa's voyager project were supportive but from the outer solar system the Earth [lies] very near the sun like a moth enthralled around the flame Did we want to aim the camera so close to the sun as to risk burning out [the] spacecraft in Vidicon system? Wouldn't it be better to delay [until] all the scientific images from uranus and neptune if the spacecraft lasted that long were taken? and so we waited a good thing - from 1981 [at] Saturn to 1986 at Uranus to 1989 when both Spacecraft had passed the orbits of neptune and pluto at last the time came But there were a few instrumental calibrations that needed to be done first and we waited a little longer will the spacecraft were in the right spots the instruments was - working beautifully and we know other pictures to take a Few project personnel opposed it. It wasn't science. They said Then we discovered that the technicians who devised and transmitted the radio commands to voyager were cash-strapped, Nasa to be laid off immediately or transferred to other jobs if The picture were to be taken it had to be done right then At the last minute actually [in] the midst of the voyager [2] encounter with neptune the then Nasa Administrator rear admiral Richard truly stepped in and made sure that these images were obtained the space scientists Candy [Hanson] of Nasa's Jet Propulsion laboratory and Carolyn porco of the University of Arizona Design the command sequence and calculated the camera exposure times So here, they are mosaic of Squares laid down on top [of] the planets a background smattering of more distant stars We were able to photograph not only the Earth, but also five other of the [suns] mine [own] planets Mercury the Innermost was lost in the glare of the sun and Mars and pluto were too small to Dimly-lit, and were too far away Uranus and neptune are so dim that to record their presence required long exposures accordingly their images were smeared because of spacecraft motion This is how the planets would look to an alien spaceship approaching the solar system after a long interstellar voyage From this distance the planet seemed only points of light smeared or moon smeared even through the high-resolution telescope [booked] aboard voyager They are like a planet seen with the naked eye [from] the surface of the Earth luminous dots brighter than most of the stars over [a] period of months the Earth like the other planets would seem to move among the stars You cannot tell merely by looking at one of these dots what it's like. What's on it? What its past has been and whether in this particular epoch anyone lives there? Because of the reflection of sunlight off the spacecraft the Earth seems to be sitting in a beam of light as if there were some [special] significance to this small world But it's just an accident of Geometry and optics The sun emits its radiation equitably in all directions had the picture been taken a little earlier or a little later there would have been no sun beam highlighting the Earth and Why that's cerulean color the blue comes partly from the sea partly from the sky While water in a glass is [transparent] it absorbs slightly more red light than blue if you [have] tens of meters of the stuff or more The red Lights absorb out and what gets reflected back to space his main label in The same way a short line of sight through air seems perfectly transparent nevertheless Something Leonardo da Vinci excelled in portraying the more distant the object the bluer. It seems, why? Because the air scatters blue light around much better that does red so the Bluish cast of this duct comes from its thick but transparent atmosphere, and it's deep oceans of liquid water and the white the [Earth] on an average day is about half covered with white water clouds We can explain the one blueness of this little world because we know it well Whether an Alien scientist newly arrived at the outskirts of our solar system Could reliably deduce oceans and clouds in a dickish atmosphere is less certain Neptune for instance is moved, but chiefly for different reasons From this distant vantage point the [Earth] might not seem of any particular interest But for us it's different Consider again that dot that's here. That's home. That's us On it everyone you love everyone You know everyone You ever heard of [every] human being who ever was lived out their lives? the aggregate or Joy and suffering thousands of confident religions ideologies and economic doctrines every Hunter and forager every hero and coward every [creator] and destroyer of Civilization every king and peasant every young couple in love every mother and father Hopeful child 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 the mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam The Earth is a very small stage in a vast Cosmic arena [some] of the Rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors, so that in glory and 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 this [pixel] on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner how frequent their misunderstandings How eager they are to kill one of them 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 The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life There is nowhere else at least in the near future to which our species could migrate visit yes settle [not] yet Like it or not for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand? you you you
That was awesome thank you.
Hope I have enough room on that drive for that one. I'll have to change for anymore of these on Carl Sagan. I salute u Sir.
In some ways, we've regressed since Sagan's era. It would be nice to have more people like him around in society.