Pale Blue Dot
My Summary
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Absolute classic by an incredible man. I loved reading about the anecdotes of Carl's time at NASA, his contribution to some huge discoveries and also his musings about the universe. At some points the text goes on and on, but on the whole a superb read.
Highlights
Today we call them planets, the Greek word for wanderers. — location: 319
The entire Earth is but a point, and the place of our own habitation but a minute corner of it. —MARCUS AURELIUS, ROMAN EMPEROR, — location: 371
Each image was composed of 640,000 individual picture elements (“pixels”), like the dots in a newspaper wirephoto or a pointillist painting. — location: 385
And after the Earth dies, some 5 billion years from now, after it is burned to a crisp or even swallowed by the Sun, there will be other worlds and stars and galaxies coming into being—and they will know nothing of a place once called Earth. — location: 489
those who first suggested that matter is made of atoms—Democritus, Epicurus, and their followers (and Lucretius, the first popularizer of science) — location: 531
lies in an undistinguished sector of an obscure spiral arm. We are thirty thousand light years from the Center. — location: 635
The universe is said to be exactly as old as the Earth. This is still the standard of Jewish, Christian, and Moslem fundamentalists and is clearly reflected in the Jewish calendar. — location: 664
The nearest spiral galaxy like our own, M31 in the constellation Andromeda, is 2 million light-years away, — location: 668
of such religious books, how could we reconcile the data? The only plausible conclusion, I think, is that God recently made all the photons of light arriving on the Earth in such a coherent format as to mislead generations of astronomers into the misapprehension that there are such things as galaxies and quasars, and intentionally driving them to the spurious conclusion that the Universe is vast and old. — location: 671
If the Universe were constructed with an inverse fourth power law rather than an inverse square law, soon there would be no planets for living beings to inhabit. — location: 789
only 0.000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 1 of our universe is hospitable to life. Thirty-six zeroes before the one. The rest is cold, radiation-riddled black vacuum. — location: 858
The oldest known fossils are about 3.6 billion years old. — location: 1472
but the early Earth may well have had a denser atmosphere. — location: 1549
We found that the air on Titan is composed mainly of nitrogen, N2, as on the Earth today. — location: 1539
We can readily make out the remnants of this convention. In English, Saturday is Saturn’s day. Sunday and Mo[o]nday are clear enough. Tuesday through Friday are named after the gods of the Saxon and kindred Teutonic invaders of Celtic/Roman Britain: Wednesday, for example, is Odin’s (or Wodin’s) day, which would be more apparent if we pronounced it as it’s spelled, “Wedn’s Day”; Thursday is Thor’s day; Friday is the day of Freya, goddess of love. The last day of the week stayed Roman, the rest of it became German. — location: 1685
Here is the memorable description by Yuri Gagarin of what he saw on the first spaceflight of the human species, aboard Vostok 1, on April 12, 1961: — location: 2083
volcanos—after Vulcan, the Roman god of fire. — location: 2363
The word “month” and the second day of the week are both named after the Moon. — location: 2565
The marsh of Camarina became proverbial for eliminating a danger in such a way as to usher in another, much worse. — location: 3692
Created by Niall Bell (niall@niallbell.com)