the world spins madly on

Dear Diane,

today will be short and sweet. 

Helen showed me this fantastic intellectual classy version of ChaCha / Yahoo answers called Quora. I highly recommend it because the ppl who answer your questions seem to have mental facilities you and I may lack. It answers self-help questions like "how to gain self-confidence" and "what is the worst argument in the world" (answer: my God is better than your god).

Here's one that really resonated with me: link and scroll to #3

It talks about the "Overview Effect," or an effect astronauts experience when viewing the Earth from orbit, seeing it like this:

I feel like I've almost grown immune to this image because I've seen it repeatedly across textbook covers and in science classes... but wow. Pretty awe-inspiring if you really imagine this tiny little planet just spinning madly around the sun.

The Overview Effect (n): While viewing the Earth from orbit or from a lunar space, some astronauts reported the belief that national boundaries vanished, the conflicts between people became less important, and the need for a planetary society with a united imperative to protect Earth becomes obvious or apparent.

Rusty Schweikart:

You look down there and you can't imagine how many borders and  boundaries you cross, again and again and again, and you don't even see  them. There you are -- hundreds of people in the Middle East killing  each other over some imaginary line that you're not even aware of, that  you can't see. And from where you see it, the thing is a whole, the  earth is a whole, and it's so beautiful. You wish you could take a  person in each hand, one from each side in the various conflicts, and  say, ‘Look. Look at it from this perspective. Look at that. What's  important?'"

It's a kind of empathy like no other, to empathize with this entire planet, this planet that has born all humanity. It looks so vulnerable from the distance and yet so much depends on it. It's an empathy we really have to practice too because it gives us a common purpose: to appreciate our time allotted on this planet and to leave it as it collectively breathes for all of us. 

I can see where the birth place of every environmentalist and every treehugger's world view emerges... in this intense love and gratitude... gratitude I haven't even begun to fully grasp. It's SO INTENSE I can feel it beginning to permeate through my body and my brain. Wow.



Here's Carl Sagan's words in whole:

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.

Elina