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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Most important image ever made?

Very cool - the experiment highlights that you shouldn't always count the pennies when considering whether something is worth doing or not :smile:
 
Photons traveling for over 13 billion years..is an awesome thought.

Heard it said most important photo was the one the astronauts took
looking down at Earth as a giant blue marble as it helped launch modern
ecology and environmental movements. That was an inward looking photo..
..this is the reverse shot...outward looking.
 
Ah, yes the Hubble Deep Field. Being so incomprehensible makes this is one of the most frightening images ever made
 
Anyone else feeling a tad bit smaller and insignificant today?
 
This might be the second.

"It was Christmas Eve, 1968, the close of one of the most turbulent, fractured years in U.S. and world history. The picture offered a much needed new perspective on "home."

For the first time in history, humankind looked at Earth and saw not a jigsaw puzzle of states and countries on an uninspiring flat map – but rather a whole planet uninterrupted by boundaries, a fragile sphere of dazzling beauty floating alone in a dangerous void. There was a home worthy of careful stewardship."

The late nature photographer Galen Rowell described this photo as "the most influential environmental photograph ever taken."

"It changed humanity's entire orientation," says Kristen Erickson of NASA headquarters in Washington, DC. "And similar photos taken by the Apollo 11 through 17 crews reinforced the impact of this first view."
 

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Steve Sherrick said:
Anyone else feeling a tad bit smaller and insignificant today?
Click to expand...
and another quote:
"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapour, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But, if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this. All our dignity consists, then, in thought. By it we must elevate ourselves, and not by space and time which we cannot fill. Let us endeavour, then, to think well; this is the principle of morality."

Let's see who is saying this smart things? ... maybe is Jim.
 
Steve Sherrick said:
Anyone else feeling a tad bit smaller and insignificant today?
Click to expand...

Actually no and I don't mean that in an egotistical way. The more I have thought about it and listened to the paradoxes that seem to occur in our perception of this weird and wonderful place we call home the more I realise that such things as time and space (and ultimately our emotional perception of it) is interrelated in an intimate and 'close' way. In no way am I leaning here towards the spiritual or religious but towards a mystery that is purely the limit of our minds. The infinite and the finite. Will they ever meet?
 
I'm not going to post it, because to many it's pretty disturbing... but the Phan Thi Kim Phuc photo from the Vietnam war, taken by Nick Ut, is an image I will never be able to get out of my mind. It's not as elegant as the Tiananmen Square photo, it's not a visual essay on stoic protest against a terrible regime. It's like a fire in the sun, a relentless attack on sensibilities, an unblinking vision of the world that war creates.

Being able to see into space and time is a brilliant and important ability we've created, and it does in fact make things seem so vast and small at the same time. It's unbelievably inspiring. However, we can not escape the reality we as humanity create for ourselves here on earth by peering into the next. Perhaps that is the message of the Ut photo some 38 years later. I guess it's place of importance is relative to the experiences of the viewer.
 
The pictures here have been of circumstances. Humbling pictures of the universe, or of the terrible situations of people.

How about Thic Quang Duc, a buddhist monk who burned himself alive to protest the persecution of buddhists in Saigon, 1963. Still a picture of circumstances, but also of the mind control one can develop. In bad times he used his mind power for protest. Yet think of what advanced monks and meditators are able to do with their mind power in good times.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th%C3%ADch_Qu%E1%BA%A3ng_%C4%90%E1%BB%A9c
 
i love that deep field stuff. what im most excited about is when they shove a new telescope up there. i cant even begin to imagine what new technology will be able to show us
 
Yea, thou I walk thru the Valley of Death, I will fear no evil, for I'm the meanest son of a bitch, in the valley.
 
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