This is a reprint of a column from years ago, perhaps still pertinent to the modern day:
This is more like a guest commentary than a question, so you, dear reader, will experience two opinions for the price of one. Let us hear first from Carl Sagan, then from the reader, then I will offer my own comment, and then, finally, the comment from an Roman ghost seen in a dream.
Unfortunately this is print, so I cannot wow you with my powers of voice impersonation. I do a pretty mean Carl Sagan, as well as an excellent Phil Silvers or Hans Conried.
Therefore, readers, I ask you to use your powers of auditory imagination, and to hear in your mind’s ear Mr. Sagan pronouncing the following words with his signature explosive b’s and sibilant s’s, and the slight pauses before each adjective, as if Mr Sagan savors the taste on his tongue of the precision of his words. Imagine a voice vibrant with good humor, almost joy, and the ever so slight musical pomposity of tone.
Carl Sagan:
“We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines…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.
