"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 (via crystallinethylacine)

We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet. We humans are already capable of manipulating the course of our own evolution. Exactly the same presumably would be true of advanced extraterrestrials. Ultimately they could halt aging and become virtually immortal.

What’s more, they might have reached that point millions of years ago. It might sound unlikely, but if you think about it logically, alien technology should be as extraordinary to us as a rocket ship to a caveman …

Like us, they would probably have evolved from a species used to exploiting whatever it can. So if aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.

From: Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking

(via super-nature)

metaconscious:

“There is a fundamental reason why we look at the sky with wonder and longing—for the same reason that we stand, hour after hour, gazing at the distant swell of the open ocean. There is something like an ancient wisdom, encoded and tucked away in our DNA, that knows its point of origin as surely as a salmonid knows its creek. Intellectually, we may not want to return there, but the genes know, and long for their origins—their home in the salty depths. But if the seas are our immediate source, the penultimate source is certainly the heavens… The spectacular truth is—and this is something that your DNA has known all along—the very atoms of your body—the iron, calcium, phosphorus, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and on and on—were initially forged in long-dead stars. This is why, when you stand outside under a moonless, country sky, you feel some ineffable tugging at your innards. We are star stuff. Keep looking up.”

— Jerry Waxman

via universewithin

(via sagansapien)