Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
In a tour of our solar system, galaxy and beyond, Cornell astronomer Sagan meshes a history of astronomical discovery, a cogent brief for space exploration and an overview of life-from its origins in the oceans to humanity's first emergence to a projected future where humans "terraform" and...
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In a tour of our solar system, galaxy and beyond, Cornell astronomer Sagan meshes a history of astronomical discovery, a cogent brief for space exploration and an overview of life-from its origins in the oceans to humanity's first emergence to a projected future where humans "terraform" and settle other planets and asteroids, Earth having long been swallowed by the sun. Maintaining that such relocation is inevitable, the author further argues that planetary science is of practical utility, fostering an interdisciplinary approach to looming environmental catastrophes such as "nuclear winter" (lethal cooling of Earth after a nuclear war, a widely accepted prediction first calculated by Sagan in 1982). His exploration of our place in the universe is illustrated with photographs, relief maps and paintings, including high-resolution images made by Voyager 1 and 2, as well as photos taken by the Galileo spacecraft, the Hubble Space Telescope and satellites orbiting Earth, which show our planet as a pale blue dot. A worthy sequel to Sagan's Cosmos. Author tour.
źródło opisu: amazon.co.uk
źródło okładki: amazon.co.uk
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Format: papier
ISBN:
0345376595
Publish date: wrzesień 1997 (data przybliżona)
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Pages no: 384
Edition language: English
If I haven't mentioned it before, let me iterate that I love Carl Sagan; I've even said that my first born child will be named after him. While this was dry in some places, which was unusual for Sagan, it was a fantastic work nonetheless. I found it very interesting that astrophysics could potenti...
When did you last despair of the fleeting nature of the human enterprise? It is a constant thought with me now. Humans have endangered the prospects of life on this planet that we call home through a consistent defiance of sensibilities. Consider the conceits that afflict us: of being a superior spe...
Sagan has been an inspirational figure to for quite a few years, but there are a couple of books by him that I hadn’t gotten around to yet. Pale Blue Dot is another commendable popular science book, where he explores issues surrounding space travel and colonisation. The treatment of subject matter s...
I missed just who Sagan was quoting, as I was e-mailing a long overdue message, but my brain was distracted back to the audio with these sentiments... ...lamentable that science has overtaken religion. Religion was human-centric; humans were the point. Science just states that humans are inconsequen...
I took so many notes out of this book! I really enjoy it when Carl Sagan talks about space. He is so passionate about it, and is smart enough to understand it and be able to explain it so easily and poetically, that it just a joy to read. On a Carl Sagan star scale (as compared to his other books), ...