Zen Pencils by Gavin Aung Than for January 09, 2023
January 02, 2023
January 16, 2023
Transcript:
Consider again 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 sunbeam. The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic area. 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 misunderstanding, 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 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 wold 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
Izzy Moreno over 1 year ago
And in this tiny dot, was birthed the most violent and destructive ideology, that has destroyed hundreds of millions of lives, and may one day extinguish the fragile flame of humanity forever…
Communism.
Willywise52 Premium Member over 1 year ago
Stupid humans.
Teto85 Premium Member over 1 year ago
We are all star stuff.
FreyjaRN Premium Member over 1 year ago
We came from the stars, and we yearn to return.
Tibby57721 over 1 year ago
Sagan sort of tries to make Russell’s “firm foundation of unyielding despair” sound nice, but meh. If we’re so small and insignificant why does any of the good matter much either?
Still I can see the good intentions in it and it sounds nice if you don’t think about it too much.
Bill D. Kat Premium Member over 1 year ago
Prior to his far too early demise, Dr. Sagan asked the folks at the Jet Propulsion Lab to turn Voyager I around as it was exiting the solar system to snap a picture of Earth, and the pale blue dot was the result. He then proceeded to write the book from which this was excerpted. Seldom if ever has the human experience been better summed up. He is missed!
Bill LaRocque Premium Member over 1 year ago
Another well done piece. Beautiful.
lsnrchrd.1 Premium Member over 1 year ago
Every American Christian nationalist who might have begun to read this ‘toon is likely to have left in a huff after finishing panel three. And all of them now hate Carl Sagan (if they did not already, at least for the few of that cohort who are aware of who he was and his lifetime works) and Gavin Aung Than equally.
anomaly over 1 year ago
We could fix the problems on Earth much more easily than we could terraform another planet to make it habitable. Reducing the population to a manageable size is the easiest solution of all. What are the odds we’ll do that?
Rocky Premium Member over 1 year ago
Outstanding…
chireef over 1 year ago
i can identify almost all of the people on panel four but can’t figure out who the intense white haired man to the left of Lincoln just below MLK and the lady between Darwin and Michael Jackson just below Elvis Presley
Free Radical over 1 year ago
VHEMT
dankelly0519 Premium Member over 1 year ago
I always appreciate your efforts. They inspire me and expand my vision.
T... over 1 year ago
Sagan was a total idiot…
Durak Premium Member over 1 year ago
That third panel, with the dollar sign thrown in at the end. Probably the most chilling part of the entire piece. Just the thought of how many devoutly worship money and spend their lives accruing as much of it as possible. What a sad statement of the way we are.
And some idiot will call me a communist because I don’t worship that dollar sign.