cassini

The Cassini-Huygens spacecraft will be ending it mission and falling into Saturn on September 15, 2017. Cassini was launched in 1997 and entered the orbit of Saturn in 2004. The Huygens spacecraft separated from it later that year and landed on Saturn's moon Titan in 2005.

The photo above is my favorite Cassini image, a view of Earth from beyond Saturn's rings.

https://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/

irma

Hurricane Irma from space, September 9:

irma from space

Hurricane Irma from space, 9/7/17:

pale blue dot

“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.”

--Carl Sagan, 'Pale Blue Dot'

'planetary'

We need to go through all human documents with a 'global search and replace' and replace the word 'international' with the word 'planetary.'

three-legged stool

There are basically three goals of the Planetarian political program:

1. a carbon tax.

2. a shift to sustainable clean energy.

3. population control and reduction.

the planetarian perspective

The planetarian perspective on things has two main components:

1.  An emphasis on the unimportance, indeed, the puniness of the human species in the vast immensity of the Cosmos. Here we are, on this little dustmite of a planet, orbiting with a bunch of other rocks around an unimportant star in a galaxy tucked away in an obscure corner of the Cosmos. Why would anybody care about us? Don’t you think we take ourselves a little too seriously?

2.  On the other hand, we are, as far as we know, the only ‘intelligent’ life out there. As we take our first baby steps into this cosmos, we should be careful Not to Blow It Here at Home.

cassiopeia stellar nursery

False-color image of the Cassiopeia constellation, taken by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. The mountainous pillars are where stars are born. Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech/Harvard-Smithsonian/CfA/ESA/STScl.

https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_476.html
(last image)