THE SAGAN SERIES все тексты (слова) песен, переводы, видео, клипы

Consider again that pale blue dot we've been talking about. Imagine that you take a good long look at it. Imagine you are staring at the dot for any length of time and then, try to convince yourself that God created the whole universe for one of the ten million or so species of life that inhabit that speck of dust.

Now take it a step further: Imagine that everything was made just for a single shade of that species, or gender, or ethnic or religious subdivision. We can recognize here a shortcoming in some circumstances serious in our ability to understand the world. Characteristically, we seem compelled to project our own nature onto Nature.

"Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work worthy of the interposition of a deity", Darwin wrote telegraphically in his notebook. "More humble and I think truer to consider him created from animals."
Were Johnny-come-latelies. We live in the cosmic boondocks. We emerged from microbes and muck. Apes are our cousins. Our thoughts and feelings are not fully under our own control. And on top of all this, were making a mess of our planet and becoming a danger to ourselves.

The trapdoor beneath our feet swings open. We find ourselves in bottomless free fall. If it takes a little myth and ritual to get us through a night that seems endless, who among us cannot sympathize and understand? We long to be here for a purpose, even though, despite much self-deception, none is evident.

Its easy to imagine skeins of historical causality. There were many possible historical paths. Our ancestors walked from East Africa to Novaya Zemlya and Ayers Rock and Patagonia, they hunted elephants with stone spearpoints, they walked the Moon a decade after entering space.

It is beyond our powers to predict the future. Catastrophic events have a way of sneaking up on us, of catching us unaware. Your own life, or your bands, or even your species might be owed to a restless few-drawn, by a craving they can hardly articulate or understand, to undiscovered lands and new worlds.

Each victory is only a prelude to another, and no boundaries can be set to rational hope.

Our particular causality skein has brought us to a modest and rudimentary, although in many respects heroic, series of explorations. But it is far inferior to what might have been and what may one day be.

It might be a familiar progression, transpiring on many worlds: a planet, newly formed, placidly revolves around its star; life slowly forms; a kaleidoscopic procession of creatures evolves; intelligence emerges which, at least up to a point, confers enormous survival value; and then technology is invented… In a flash, they create world-altering contrivances.

Some planetary civilizations see their way through, place limits on what may and what must not be done, and safely pass through the time of perils. Others, not so lucky or so prudent, perish.

This is one reason that in the long astronomical perspective there is something truly epochal about “now”…

This is the first moment in the history of our planet when any species, by its own voluntary actions, has become a danger to itself, as well as to vast numbers of others.