The WUWT kangaroo court is busy poring over blog posts from Antarctica, trying to find snippets that Anthony can use to justify the pre-emptive "Guilty" verdict WUWT pronounced a few days ago. Shades of stolen emails, except the blogs are public. It seems to be keeping them distracted for a while. (Not sure if they'll be moving on to pronounce "Guilty" verdicts for yachts that need rescuing or anyone else that dares a risky activity.)
Anyway this seems a good time to have a break of sorts. To be inspired instead of despired :)
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| Credit: NASA |
A couple of days ago someone tweeted a video (below) of Carl Sagan. I've prefaced it with some of the words he spoke almost two decades earlier - which I expect readers are familiar with, to remind me that it pays to take a wider perspective from time to time.
Carl Edward Sagan (November 9, 1934 – December 20, 1996)
Those worlds in space are as countless as all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the Earth. Each of those worlds is as real as ours. In every one of them, there's a succession of incidents, events, occurrences which influence its future. Countless worlds, numberless moments, an immensity of space and time.
And our small planet, at this moment, here we face a critical branch-point in the history. What we do with our world, right now, will propagate down through the centuries and powerfully affect the destiny of our descendants. It is well within our power to destroy our civilization, and perhaps our species as well.
If we capitulate to superstition, or greed, or stupidity we can plunge our world into a darkness deeper than time between the collapse of classical civilization and the Italian Renaissance.
But, we are also capable of using our compassion and our intelligence, our technology and our wealth, to make an abundant and meaningful life for every inhabitant of this planet. To enhance enormously our understanding of the Universe, and to carry us to the stars."
From Carl Sagan's Cosmos episode 8, "Journeys in Space and Time". (1980)
Carl Sagan - one of his last interviews
"This combustible mixture of ignorance and power sooner or later will blow up in our faces."
"A Science Icon Died 17 Years Ago. In His Last Interview, He Made A Warning That Gives Me Goosebumps." Rajiv Narayan
