Fragments From Floyd

This blows me away. By all means, load a full size image (here). Scan across the image slowly, as if you were flying over it yourself, which, in a sense, you are. From your computer chair, a tiny speck on the face of Earth, you are seeing something no eyes in history have seen... the water-carved surface of Mars. There seems to be no other explanation for the mesas and plateaus, arroyos and canyons and alluvial fans, pocked here and there by round meteor craters. I am awed by our technologies, our drive to push back the edges of our ignorance, to extend the reach of our hands.

As animals go, we are rather pitiful and puny, clawless, weak-toothed creatures. We can't run particularly fast or for very long. We have the five senses, each of which are easily outstripped by "lower" animals-- the vision of an eagle, the hearing of a fox, the touch sensitivity of a mole's pink nose. But look what we have done with our minds to extend the force of our hands, the sight of our eyes, the edge of the known and knowable universe. Man has reason to be proud. As Shakespeare said--

What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals!

And for a moment this morning, imagining myself flying near the very surface of another world comprehended now by human sight, I basked in pride at our accomplishments as a species. Then, I clicked on a couple of news sites, and now I am ashamed and humbled by our smallness and violence to each other and the Earth. And so, it is also true:

What a piece of work is a man! How brutish in reason! How myopic in faculty! In form and moving how violent and deplorable! In action, how like a lunatic! In apprehension, how like a beast! The destroyer of worlds! The most destructive of animals!

We still have far, far to go.