Size doesn't matter

Just how big is this planet we live and die on? In the overall scheme of things, not very. One way to get an idea of our size is to imagine us compared to the sun. The sun is about 100 times as wide as the earth. Looking at the earth in terms of volume, if you could melt the Earth into a liquid and 'pour' it into a sphere the size of the Sun, it would take nearly 130,000 earths to fill it.
Now that we have some idea of our size compared to the sun, lets compare the size of the sun to Arcturus. The third brightest star in the sky, it's a red giant, 22 million miles in diameter which is 25.7 times that of the sun! If we can imagine Arcturus as the size of a softball, the sun in comparison, shrinks to the size of a BB.

It gets better. The largest known star is Pistol. Imagine Pistol being the size of a soccer ball. Now Arcturus, in comparison to Pistol,becomes the BB and our Sun becomes a grain of sand. Oops! What happened to earth? It just disappeared. If the sun is down to the size of a grain of sand and we could lay 100 earths alongside that grain of sand, how big does that make us, god's greatest creation? God would need a microscope to find us.

Carl Sagan, the famous astronomer, described our planet in a moving public lecture at his own university of Cornell on October 13, 1994. During that lecture, he presented a photo taken four years earlier by the spacecraft Voyager 1 as it sped away from earth some 4 billion miles away. The controllers gave a command for it to turn around and take a picture behind it as it left our solar system. Purely by accident the Earth was captured in the photo. It showed up as an infinitesimal point of light, smaller than a single pixel on the photo. Dr Sagan's talk is one of the most moving peices I have ever read. If we insist on displaying documents on the lawns or in the halls of public courthouses, it should be this 344 word masterpiece.

Read what he had to say.

"We succeeded in taking that picture from deep space, and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every 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 in 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 the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. 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. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, 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 and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."

Again, if we insist on placing documents on the lawn and walls of public places, this is the one that should be there.