"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 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.

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 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 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.
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. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. 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 with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."

—Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, 1997 reprint, pp. xv–xvi

Hope we learned something new today boys. :)

And I hope to start a new thread series. I want to call it, "FootyRoom fact of the week". It's basically going to be a random football fact that I post every week. Anyone interested? You might just learn a new thing or two. :D

If you want me to do it, just comment below. :)

"the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe"

well we kinda do, as our planet is in the perfect position to sustain an abundance of different life forms >.<

@nandaYNWA

Yes it may, but undoubtedly, with the billions of trillions of stars, and all those millions of billions of planets surrounding them, you'd suspect that there's BOUND to be life elsewhere as well. And what's more is, even IF we have life, what power does that give us in the universe? We can explore what's within our reach. We can even create and destroy if we have the necessary tools. But in the true aspect of things, how much effect does that really have in this titanic universe? No matter what we do, we cannot change the fact that we are just one tiny speck in a gigantic plane.

Even if we try to create as much chaos as possible, there's nothing we can do to stop the flow of the universe. The Earth will still be revolving around the Sun. After a while, the Sun will grow so big that it swallows the Earth. The Sun will still be revolving around the center of the Milky Way. And in the end, the black hole at the center of the Milky Way will swallow the Sun and all around it, destroying it forever. If we can do something to prevent this terrible fate of our galaxy and our beloved Earth, THEN we will have truly earned some privileged position in the universe. :)

Are you trying to be the new Felixxkrimm or something?, jk pretty interesting post, just shows how small the world we live in is.

Dynastian, I don't often say this on FR but that was a truly enlightening post. Karl Sagan was a great man. RIP.

To expound upon Dynastian's point, consider this: In the following picture of a single volume of space, every dot represents a single GALAXY.

Every galaxy (like our own "Milky Way" contains numerous planets & stars (some are significatnyl larger than ours). It is estimated that there is a MINIMUM of 176 BILLION galaxies. These estimations are only based upon the primitive technology available to us. There is probably lots more. Just imagine how many planets/stars that makes. And our entire world is 1 tiny little star amongst those. And you are on parcel of land invisible on that tiny planet. and you are... insignificant (in the extremest sense) to the universe.

Ever heard of the Total Perspective Vortex?

Google is your friend, as is Douglas Adams. ;)

Before Nicolaus Copernicus, it was so natural for people to assume that the sun rotated
around the earth.

“Because it looks that way”, people would say.

And when you would ask what would it look like if the earth rotated around
the sun, while rotating about its own axis?

People would say, "Exactly the same”

It seems that we unknowingly have an innate sense of
centrality and want to believe everything that happens in the universe always
has us in mind. But really, we are a speck of dust and the product of millions of destroyed stars and galaxies.