The even managed to get the horizon right...

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AB22 Easy Tiger

AB22 Easy Tiger

Heaven Branch
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Sometimes, my friends, you’ve just got to take a step back, breathe deeply, and reflect for a moment on what it means to be human.
Why, one might ask, are we here? Honestly, I don’t begin to have an answer to that.
What makes our species special? Now there’s a question I’ll take a stab at. For me, it’s our inquisitive nature, our desire to reach beyond our immediate surroundings and probe the unknown.
This began when the first humans walked out of Africa some 60,000 years ago, continued as they explored Asia, Europe and walked or rowed across Beringia and the Pacific Ocean to reach North America. Millennia later Europeans crossed the Atlantic to again reach North America. And a century ago humans first walked to the south pole.
Today our exploration of the unknown takes place in still more remote locations, deep under the sea, in caves and, most amazingly, off planet.
If you’re struggling for some inspiration today, think about the fact that our species had the capacity to blast a pair of probes off our green and blue rock, send it hurtling across tens of millions of miles of space, and land it on a red rock without much of an atmosphere to slow said probes down.
Now, thanks to Opportunity, take a look at a world the generation that came just before ours could only dream of and write science fiction about.


Behold Mars, people.

Houston Chronicle

(Not sure the copyright claim is valid mind)​
 


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.

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, 1994
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If that's Mars, who are they expecting to operate that joystick?

Looks like Wadi Rum. Been there :)
 
While we were on Creswell Bay trying to photograph the Northern lights, we watched the small dot of Mars coming over the horizon. Amazing.
 
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