Let's Fire Up Those Neurons!

Before it gets lost, I want to comment on Soka's reply to my Voyager puzzle. 'Carl', as I hope most of you already get, was Carl Sagan. He was instrumental in assembling the messages and scientific information included in the golden discs on board the Voyager crafts. He also played a role in the generation of this very famous photograph — popularly known as 'the pale blue dot'.

​

The pale blue dot is an image, taken by Voyager 1, of the earth suspended in a beam of sunlight. This picture was taken from a distance of 6 billion kilometers! Here is an excerpt from Dr Sagan's book of the same name, narrated by him, where he talks about the significance of this image. It is the most profound and moving commentary I have ever heard.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p86BPM1GV8M

 

Since I can't edit my original post, here's the text from the video,

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 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.

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, Pale Blue Dot, 1994

​

 

Ominous clues! Not sure I like them. :-( This better be a temporary sayonara.

 

A lighter puzzle to get the week started...


He was inspired by two who came before him. Eventually, his creator came to despise him. Identify this fictional character. Hidden in each image is a word straight from the title of one of his books. No indirect clues. Don't overthink it!