Urs Hanselmann

@healeybn1.bsky.social

Decency and common sense, classic cars, jazz, aviation, space & astronomy, birding, scuba diving, travel, nature and movie lover 📍🇨🇭 „Ich bin mit der Gesamtsituation unzufrieden“ 🤠

Wollow tree on a overgrown riverbank in soft light at sunset. Reflection in the calm dark river.

Schnappschusd aus dem fahrenden Auto mit Ausblick auf die verschneiten Alpengipfel. Davor erstreckt sich das hügelige Emmentaler Gebiet mit Wiesen und Wäldern. Darüber ein wolkenlosen Himmel.

Appleblossoms in front of the riding moon in a dark blue cloudless sky.

$Carl Sagan about earth, you and us: From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar", every "supreme leader", every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. Carl Sagan$