Last night, we finished watching the Cosmos series. I remember watching the Carl Sagan version as a child. It you weren’t affected by it, you weren’t paying attention. The new version is wonderful as well. We watched it as a family. The kids got different things out of it, and didn’t understand many things, but that’s fine. We had great discussions, and turned on some curiousity. It was also a rare setting where my geekiness is a plus. Speed of light? About 186,000 miles per second or 300 million meters per second. Distance to the sun? About 93 million miles. Etc.
Near the end, there was a bit on the “Pale Blue Dot” of Earth. It is well worth watching in full.
Since seeing this, I have felt a bit distant myself. It is awesome in the literal sense. And of course this view is still within our solar system, it does not begin to show the true size of the universe. The show should have ended right there.
The Earth is the small dot about halfway up the stripe on the right. (The stripe is an artifact of Voyagers’ photography, it does not exist in reality.)
