A Picture Says 1,000 Words - Page 86

The earliest picture of the universe ever taken. Density (starting at most dense) goes from red to blue

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.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. 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. 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.

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.

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.

A depiction of early human migration. The numbers represent millennia before present day

the edge of human expedition as we know it

Tardigrades (commonly known as waterbears or moss piglets)[2] are small, water-dwelling, segmented animals with eight legs. They form the phylum Tardigrada, and part of the superphylum Ecdysozoa. It's an ancient group, with fossils dating from 530 million years ago, in the cambrian period.[3] The first tardigrades were discovered by Johann August Ephraim Goeze in 1773. Since 1778, over 500 new tardigrade species have been found. Usually, Tardigrades are 1mm when they are fully grown. They are short and plump with 4 pairs of poorly articulated lobopodial limbs. Each limb has 4-8 claws also known as disks. Tardigrades all possess a buccopharyngeal membrane apparatus, which, along with the claws, are used to differentiate the different species. Tardigrades are covered in cuticle which contains chitin and protein.

How a maggot really looks like.

The house dust mite (sometimes referred to by allergists as HDM) is a cosmopolitan guest in human habitation. Dust mites feed on organic detritus such as flakes of shed human skin and flourish in the stable environment of dwellings. House dust mites are a common cause of asthma and allergic symptoms worldwide. The mite's gut contains potent digestive enzymes (notably proteases) that persist in their feces and are major inducers of allergic reactions such as wheezing. The mite's exoskeleton can also contribute to allergic reactions. The European house dust mite (Dermatophagoides pteronyssinus) and the American house dust mite (Dermatophagoides farinae) are two different species, but are not necessarily confined to Europe or North America; a third species Euroglyphus maynei also occurs widely.

Its part bear. Its part shark. And its part octopus. Its bearsharkoctopus.