I spent an hour or so today over at the excellent blog Berto: Philosophy Monkey viewing the various videos there - if you visit be sure to view the (40 minutes, but worth it) Pale Blue Dot Episode 1: Wanderers. I was captivated. I’ve posted my thoughts on Carl Sagan’s wonderful words before and this much longer (unauthorised but very well done) video brings Carl’s words to life even more.

After tidying up the site a little I also decided to improve the header image by adding a slideshow using the excellent NextGen Gallery plugin. After a little assistance from this blogger on how to incorporate it into the header file, it didn’t take more than half an hour to sort it out. Thanks Ruth!

I found some NASA images and ones from my own collection of bush and beach photos and turned them into panoramic images in PhotoShop. I had the whole job done in an hour. What do you think? Worth the effort? I reckon so anyway. If you are interested, the beach photo is of Piha Beach in West Auckland and the bush and water scene was taken at the Darwin Botanical Gardens!

To return to Carl Sagan’s writings, I’ll just let him have the last say -
“Look again at 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 of our 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 a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”

Puts the whole ‘intelligent design debate’ and ‘my god is better than your god’ nonsense into perspective doesn’t it?

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