¶ Spaceship Earth
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Index Entry
Spaceship Earth:
"I invented this phrase, Spaceship Earth, a number of years ago when I was trying to get man to-- trying to help him, personally, particularly young people, to shake themselves loose of preoccupation with the powerfully conditioned reflex that there is something called Earth and something called space, this Heaven and Earth idea. I used to have students say to me ‘I wonder what it would be like to be on a spaceship?’ And I’d say: ‘What does it feel like?’
"The relative size of things… When you get to the size of our Earth in space, 8,000 miles’ diameter-- the Sun’s corona when you look at it with filters through a telescope we can actually see it-- in the larger magnification, one of the flames would be about an inch. One inch of flame is often an altitude of over a hundred times the diameter of our Earth. The size of our Earth would be undetectable in one of those flames.
"The distance to the next nearest star to ur Sun takes light coming 700 million miles and hour four and two-thirds years to get here. So somewhere between that kind of distance we have a tiny invisible spot of 8,000 miles’ diameter, our planet,
¶ Citations
- Rasa Gustaitis, §HOLLY ROUND, p.161, (HR&W,NY) Feb’73
