The Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of planet Earth taken in 1990 by Voyager 1 from a record distance, showing it against the vastness of space. By request of Carl Sagan, NASA commanded the Voyager 1 spacecraft, having completed its primary mission and now leaving the Solar System, to turn its camera around and to take a photograph of Earth across a great expanse of space.

Subsequently, the title of the photograph was used by Sagan as the primary title of his 1994 book, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space.

“The spacecraft was a long way from home.

I thought it would be a good idea, just after Saturn, to have them take one last glance homeward. From Saturn, the Earth would appear too small for Voyager to make out any detail. Our planet would be just a point of light, a lonely pixel hardly distinguishable from the other points of light Voyager would see: nearby planets, far off suns. But precisely because of the obscurity of our world thus revealed, such a picture might be worth having.

It had been well understood by the scientists and philosophers of classical antiquity that the Earth was a mere point in a vast, encompassing cosmos—but no one had ever seen it as such. Here was our first chance, and perhaps also our last for decades to come.

So, here they are: a mosaic of squares laid down on top of the planets in a background smattering of more distant stars. Because of the reflection of sunlight off the spacecraft, the Earth seems to be sitting in a beam of light, as if there were some special significance to this small world; but it’s just an accident of geometry and optics. There is no sign of humans in this picture: not our reworking of the Earth’s surface; not our machines; not ourselves. From this vantage point, our obsession with nationalisms is nowhere in evidence. We are too small. On the scale of worlds, humans are inconsequential: a thin film of life on an obscure and solitary lump of rock and metal.

Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you’ve ever heard of, every human being who ever was lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings; thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines; every hunter and forager; every hero and coward; every creator and destroyer of civilizations; every king and peasant, every young couple in love; every mother and father; hopeful child; inventor and explorer; every teacher of morals; every corrupt politician; every supreme leader; every superstar; 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.

Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings; how eager they are to kill one another; how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity—in all this vastness—there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. It underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the only home we’ve ever known.

The pale blue dot.”

Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial is an award-winning NOVA documentary on the case of Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, which concentrated on the question of whether or not intelligent design could be viewed as science and taught in school science class. It first aired on PBS in November 2007 and features interviews with the judge, witnesses, and lawyers as well as re-enacted scenes using the official transcript of the trial.

In April 2008 the documentary won a Peabody Award. It won the 2008 Science Journalism Award presented by the American Association for the Advancement of Science to honor excellence in science reporting.

The documentary was praised by Nature, and described as accurate by the National Center for Science Education. Variety magazine also gave the documentary a positive review, and said it was one of the year’s most important television projects, that “should be shown not just in every U.S. high school but in houses of worship as well.”

In contrast, creationist and intelligent design supporters have criticized the documentary. The Discovery Institute produced a website critical of the broadcast,^[8][9] while Answers in Genesis stated the evidence for evolution presented by scientists in Judgment Day was fallacious. The Institute for Creation Research (ICR) also claimed the film was not balanced.

WKNO-TV, the local PBS affiliate in Memphis, initially decided not to air the documentary because of the “controversial nature” of the subject, but later reversed its decision.

Episode 14 Cosmos: A Personal Voyage: “Ted Turner Interviews Dr. Sagan”

Some versions of the series including the first North American home video release included a specially made 14th episode, which consisted of an hour-long interview between Sagan and Ted Turner,[8] in which the two discussed the series and new discoveries in the years since its first broadcast. This unique episode was not included in the DVD release.

Carl Sagan gave his last interview with Charlie rose on May 27th 1996. He discussed pseudo-science, religion, unfounded claims, his personal love affair with science and his struggle with myelodysplasia as well as other elements of his last book: The Demon-Haunted World.

The Demon-Haunted World changed my life in ways more profound than I thought possible. That book, and the name of Carl Sagan, should be known to every high school graduate.

“Better the hard truth, I say, than the comforting fantasy. And in the final tolling it often turns out that the facts are more comforting than the fantasy.”

National Inflation Association. (NIA) believes Meltup is the most important economic documentary ever produced in world history. The Second American Revolution has begun! Please share this documentary with all of your friends and family members immediately!

This is a sequel to NIA’s critically acclaimed “Hyperinflation Nation” and its latest documentary “The Dollar Bubble,” which has been viewed over 687,000 times since November 23rd.

The U.S. economy is currently experiencing a “Meltup” and NIA believes this “Meltup” is a prelude to a currency collapse and hyperinflation. Our economy needs to experience a “Meltdown” so that the free market can rebalance it, but by trying to prevent a much needed recession, the Federal Reserve has made a massive devaluation of the U.S. dollar inevitable.

U.S. citizens have not yet felt the pain of the government bailouts, which have deceptively transferred the wealth of the middle class to bankers on Wall Street under the ruse of “too big to fail.” Institutions on Wall Street needed to fail in order to have a truly healthy economy. By bailing them out and rapidly expanding the size of government, we have sowed the seeds of a U.S. dollar hyperinflationary death spiral and the end of entitlement programs Americans have become dependent on to live and survive.

The National Inflation Association is an organization that is dedicated to preparing Americans for hyperinflation. The NIA offers free membership at http://www.inflation.us and provides its members with articles about the economy and inflation, news stories, important charts not shown by the mainstream media; YouTube videos featuring Jim Rogers, Marc Faber, Ron Paul, Peter Schiff, and others; and profiles of gold, silver, and agriculture companies that we believe could prosper in an inflationary environment.

Robert Scott Lazar (January 26, 1959), or Bob Lazar, claims to have worked from 1988 until 1989 as a physicist at an area called S-4 (Sector Four), located near Groom Lake, Nevada, next to Area 51. According to Lazar, S-4 served as a hidden military location for the study of extraterrestrial flying saucers. Lazar says he saw nine different discs there and provides details on their mode of propulsion. 

In November 1989, Lazar appeared in a special interview with investigative reporter  George Knapp on Las Vegas TV station KLAS to discuss his alleged employment at S-4. In his interview with Knapp, Lazar said he first thought the saucers were secret, terrestrial aircraft, whose test flights must have been responsible for many UFO reports. Gradually, on closer examination and from having been shown multiple briefing documents, Lazar came to the conclusion that the discs must have been of extraterrestrial origin. In his filmed testimony, Lazar explains how this impression first hit him after he boarded the craft under study and examined their interior.

For the propulsion of the studied vehicles, Bob Lazar claims that the atomic element 115 served as a nuclear fuel. Element 115 (nicknamed ‘Ununpentium’ (Uup)) reportedly provided an energy source which would produce anti-gravity effects under proton bombardment along with the production of antimatter used for energy production. Lazar’s website says, as the intense strong nuclear force field of element 115′s nucleus would be properly amplified, the resulting effect would be a distortion of the surrounding gravitational field, allowing the vehicle to immediately shorten the distance to a charted destination.^[3]

Lazar also claims that he was given introductory briefings describing the historical involvement by extraterrestrial beings with this planet for 10,000 years. The beings originate from the Zeta Reticuli 1 & 2 star system and are therefore referred to as Zeta Reticulians, popularly called ‘Greys’.^[4]

Lazar says he has degrees from the California Institute of Technology and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1993, the Los Angeles Times looked into his background and found there was no evidence to support his claims.^[1] Stanton Friedman was only able to verify that Lazar took electronics courses in the late 1970s at Pierce Junior College.^[5] His educational and professional background cannot be verified — a fact he attributes to government deletion of records.”^[6]

The talk about surgical robots is also a talk about surgery. And while I’ve tried to make my images not too graphic, keep in mind that surgeons have a different relationship with blood than normal people do. Because after all, what a surgeon does to a patient, if it were done without consent, would be a felony. Surgeons are the tailors, the plumbers, the carpenters, some would say the butchers of the medical world. Cutting, reshaping, reforming, bypassing, fixing. But you need to talk about surgical instruments and the evolution of surgical technology together.

So in order to give you some kind of a perspective of where we are right now with surgical robots, and where we’re going to be going in the future, I want to give you a little bit of perspective of how we got to this point. How we even came to believe that surgery was OK, that this was something that was possible to do, that this kind of cutting and reforming was OK.

So, a little bit of perspective – about 10,000 years of perspective. So this is a trephanated skull. And trephanation is simply just cutting a hole in the skull. And many, many hundreds of skulls like this have been found in archaeological sites all over the world, dating back five to 10 thousand years. Five to 10 thousand years. Now imagine this. You are a healer in a Stone Age village. And you have some guy that you’re not quite sure what’s wrong with him. Oliver Sacks is going to be born way in the future. He’s got some seizure disorder. And you don’t understand this. But you think to yourself, “I’m not quite sure what’s wrong with this guy. But maybe if I cut a hole in his head I can fix it.” (Laughter) Now that is surgical thinking.

Now we’ve got the dawn of interventional surgery here. What is astonishing about this is even though we don’t know really how much of this was intended to be religious, or how much of it was intended to be theraputic, what we can tell is that these patients lived. Judging by the healing on the borders of these holes, they lived days, months, years following trephanation. And so what we are seeing is evidence of a refined technique, that was being handed down over thousands and thousands of years, all over the world. This arose independently at sites everywhere, that had no communication to one another. We really are seeing the dawn of interventional surgery.

Now we can fast forward many thousands of years into the Bronze Age and beyond. And we see new refined tools coming out. But surgeons in these eras are a little bit more conservative than their bold, trephanating ancestors. These guys confined their surgery to fairly superficial injuries. And surgeons were tradesmen, rather than physicians. This persisted all the way into and through the Renaissance.

That may have saved the writers, But it didn’t really save the surgeons terribly much. They were still a mistrusted lot. Surgeons still had a bit of a PR problem. Because the landscape was dominated by the itinerant barber surgeon. These were folks that traveled from village to village, town to town, doing surgery sort of as a form of performance art. Because we were in the age before anesthesia. And the agony of the patient is really as much of the public spectacle as the surgery itself. One of the most famous of these guys, Frere Jacques, shown here doing a lithotomy. The removal of the bladder stone, one of the most invasive surgeries they did at the time, had to take less than two minutes. You had to have quite a flare for the dramatic, and be really, really quick.

And so here you see him doing a lithotomy. And he is credited with doing over 4,000 of these public surgeries, wandering around in Europe. Which is an astonishing number, when you think that surgery must have been a last resort. I mean who would put themselves through that? Until anesthesia, the absence of sensation. With the demonstration of the Morton Ether Inhaler at the Mass. General in 1847, a whole new era of surgery was ushered in. Anesthesia gave surgeons the freedom to operate. Anesthesia gave them the freedom to experiment, to start to delve deeper into the body. This was truly a revolution in surgery.

But there was a pretty big problem with this. After these very long, painstaking operations, attempting to cure things they’d never been able to touch before, the patients died. They died of massive infection. Surgery didn’t hurt anymore, but it killed you pretty quickly. And infection would continue to claim a majority of surgical patients until the next big revolution in surgery. Which was the aseptic technique.

Now Joseph Lister was asepis’s, or sterility’s, biggest advocate, to a very very skeptical bunch of surgeons. But eventually they did come around. The Mayo brothers came out to visit Lister in Europe. And they came back to their American clinic and they said they had learned it was as important to wash your hands before doing surgery as it was to wash up afterwards. Something so simple. And yet, operative mortality dropped profoundly.

These surgeries were actually now being effective. With the patient insensitive to pain, and a sterile operating field all bets were off, the sky was the limit. You could now start doing surgery everywhere, on the gut, on the liver, on the heart, on the brain. Transplantation: you could take an organ out of one person, you could put it in another person, and it would work. Surgeons didn’t have a problem with respectability anymore. They had become gods.

The era of the “big surgeon, big incision” had arrived. But at quite a cost. Because they are saving lives, but not necessarily quality of life. Because healthy people don’t usually need surgery. And unhealthy people have a very hard time recovering from a cut like that. The question had to be asked, “Well, can we do these same surgeries but through little incisions?” Laparoscopy is doing this kind of surgery. Surgery with long instruments, through small incisions. And it really changed the landscape of surgery. Some of the tools for this had been around for a hundred years. But it had only been used as a diagnostic technique until the 1980s, When there was changes in camera technologies and things like that, that allowed this to be done for real operations.

So what you see — this is now the first surgical image – as we’re coming down the tube, this is a new entry into the body. It looks very different from what you’re expecting surgery to look like. We bring instruments in, from two separate cuts in the side, and then you can start manipulating tissue. Within 10 years of the first gallbladder surgeries being done laparoscopically, a majority of gallbladder surgeries were being done laparoscopically. Truly a pretty big revolution.

But there were casualties to this revolution. These techniques were a lot harder to learn than people had anticipated. The learning curve was very long. And during that learning curve the complications went quite a bit higher. Surgeons had to give up their 3D vision. They had to give up their wrists. They had to give up intuitive motion in the instruments. This surgeon has over 3,000 hours of laparoscopic experience. Now this is a particularly frustrating placement of the needle. But this is hard. And one of the reasons why it is so hard is because the external ergonomics are terrible. You’ve got these long instruments, and you’re working off your center line. And the instruments are essentially working backwards.

So what you need to do, to take the capability of your hand, and put it on the other side of that small incision, is you need to put a wrist on that instrument. And so — I get to talk about robots – the da Vinci robot put just that wrist on the other side of that incision. And so here you’re seeing the operation of this wrist. And now, in contrast to the laparoscopy, you can precisely place the needle in your instruments, and you can pass it all the way through and follow it in a trajectory. And the reason why this becomes so much easier is, you can see on the bottom, the hands are making the motions, and the instruments are following those motions exactly. Now, what you put between those instruments and those hands, is a large, fairly complicated robot. The surgeon is sitting at a console, and controlling the robot with these controllers. And the robot is moving these instruments around, and powering them, down inside the body. You have a 3D camera, so you get a 3D view.

And since this was introduced in 1999 a lot of these robots have been out and being used for surgical procedures like a prostatectomy. Which is, a prostate deep in the pelvis, and it requires fine dissection and delicate manipulation to be able to get a good surgical outcome. You can also sew bypass vessels onto a beating heart without cracking the chest. This is all done in between the ribs. And you can go inside the heart itself and repair the valves from the inside. You’ve got these technologies — thank you – (Applause) And so you might say, “Wow this is really cool! So, smartypants, why isn’t all surgery being done this way?” And there are some reasons, some good reasons. And cost is one of them.

I talked about the large, complicated robot. With all its bells and whistles, one of those robots will cost you about as much as a solid gold surgeon. More useful than a solid gold surgeon, but, still, it’s a fairly big capital investment. But once you’ve got it, your procedure costs do come down. But there are other barriers. So something like a prostatectomy, the prostate is small, and it’s in one spot. And you can set your robot up very precisely to work in that one spot. And so it’s perfect for something like that. And in fact if you, or anyone you know, had their prostate taken out in the last couple of years, chances are it was done with one of these systems. But if you need to reach more places than just one, you need to move the robot. And you need to put some new incisions in there. And you need to re-set it up. And you need to add some more ports, and more. And the problem is it gets time consuming, and cumbersome.

And for that reason there are many surgeries that just aren’t being done with the da Vinci. So we had to ask the question, “Well how do we fix that?” What if we could change it so that we didn’t have to re-set up each time we wanted to move somewhere different? What if we could bring all the instruments in together in one place? How would that change the capabilities of the surgeon? And how would that change the experience for the patient? Now, to do that, we need to be able to bring a camera, and instruments, in together through one small tube, like that tube you saw in the laparoscopy video. Or, not so coincidentally, like a tube like this.

So what’s going to come out of that tube is the debut of this new technology, this new robot that is going to be able to reach anywhere. Ready? So here it comes. This is the camera, and three instruments. And as you see it come out, in order to actually be able to do anything useful, it can’t all stay clustered up like this. It has to be able to come off of the center line and then be able to work back toward that center line. He’s a cheeky little devil. But what this lets you do is gives you that all-important traction, and counter traction, so that you can dissect, so that you can sew, so that you can do all the things that you need to do, all the surgical tasks. But it’s all coming in through one incision. It’s not so simple. But it’s worth it for the freedom that this gives us as we’re going around. For the patient, however, it’s transparent. This is all they’re going to see.

It’s very exciting to think where we get to go with this. We get to write the script of the next revolution in surgery. As we take these capabilities, and we get to go to the next places, we get to decide what our new surgeries are going to be. And I think to really get the rest of the way in that revolution, we need to not just take our hands in in new ways, we also need to take our eyes in in new ways. We need to see beyond the surface. We need to be able to guide what we’re cutting in a much better way.

This is a cancer surgery. One of the problems with this, even for surgeons who’ve been looking at this a lot, is you can’t see the cancer, especially when it’s hidden below the surface. And so what we’re starting to do is we’re starting to inject specially designed markers into the bloodstream that will target the cancer. It will go, bind to the cancer. And we can make those markers glow. And we can take special cameras, and we can look at it. Now we know where we need to cut, even when it’s below the surface. We can take these markers and we can inject them in a tumor site. And we can follow where they flow out from that tumor site, so we can see the first places where that cancer might travel. We can inject these dyes into the bloodstream, so that when we do a new vessel and we bypass a blockage on the heart, we can see if we actually made the connection, before we close that patient back up again. Something that we haven’t been able to do, without radiation, before. We can light up tumors like this kidney tumor so that you can exactly see where the boundary is between the kidney tumor, and the kidney you want to leave behind. Or the liver tumor, and the liver you want to leave behind.

And we don’t even need to confine ourselves to this macro vision. We have flexible microscopic probes that we can bring down into the body. And we can look at cells directly. I’m looking at nerves here. So these are nerves you see, down on the bottom, and the microscope probe that’s being held by the robotic hand, up at the top. So this is all very prototypey at this point. But you care about nerves, if you are a surgical patient. Because they let you keep continence, bladder control, and sexual function after surgery. All of which is generally fairly important to the patient.

So, with the combination of these technologies we can reach it all, and we can see it all. We can heal the disease. And we can leave the patient whole and intact and functional afterwards. Now, I’ve talked about the patient as if the patient is, somehow, someone abstract outside this room. And that is not the case. Many of you, all of you maybe, will at some point, or have already, faced a diagnosis of cancer, or heart disease, or some organ disfuction that’s going to buy you a date with a surgeon. And when you get to that point – I mean, these maladies don’t care how many books you’ve written, how many companies you’ve started, that Nobel Prize you have yet to win, how much time you planned to spend with your children. These maladies come for us all.

And the prospect I’m offering you, of an easier surgery … is that going to make that diagnosis any less terrifying? I’m not sure I really even want it to. Because facing your own mortality causes a re-evaluation of priorities, and a realignment of what your goals are in life, unlike anything else. And I would never want to deprive you of that epiphany. What I want instead, is for you to be whole, intact, and functional enough to go out and save the world, after you’ve decided you need to do it. And that is my vision for your future. Thank you. (Applause)

This documentary is thought provoking and compelling.

First of all, everything is up to date and there is excellent footage of UFO’s and modern computer simulations where video of sightings are not available. Forget the blurry blobs of the past. Feast you eyes on relatively sharp images and clear shapes in colour.

Secondly, it makes use of old footage of statements made by Government officials during the late forties and fifties to great effect. Each statement on it’s own seems insignificant but when many such statements are seen together it soon becomes clear that something “funny” is going on. By the end you’ll realise that the government position is a joke. How stupid do they think we are?

Thirdly, this documentary is suitable for skeptics and those who know little about the subject. You will be informed about the origins of the “flying saucer” phenomenon and where it’s at now. A case will be presented in which the evidence cannot be denied. Only a fool would persist in saying there is nothing to it. People who believe in the existance of extra-terrestrial life will get a lot out of it as well. You may feel like shouting “See – I told you so!”.

Another interesting point is that this documentary covers the religious aspect and interviews two theologians to great effect. What they have to say is fascinating.

This is easily the best UFO documentary I have seen and I commend its creators. They have presented the evidence in a professional and exhaustive manner. The DVD contains a 1 hour bonus entitled “UFO’s Fifty Years of Denial” which is also excellent. I cannot recommend this DVD highly enough!

In a world-first breakthrough, University of New South Wales (UNSW) medical researchers have used stem cells cultured on a simple contact lens to restore sight to sufferers of blinding corneal disease.

Sight was significantly improved within weeks of the procedure, which is simple, inexpensive and requires a minimal hospital stay.

The research team from UNSW’s School of Medical Sciences harvested stem cells from patients’ own eyes to rehabilitate the damaged cornea. The stem cells were cultured on a common therapeutic contact lens which was then placed onto the damaged cornea for 10 days, during which the cells were able to re-colonise the damaged eye surface.

While the novel procedure was used to rehabilitate damaged corneas, the researchers say it offers hope to people with a range of blinding eye conditions and could have applications in other organs.

A paper detailing the breakthrough appears in the high-impact journal Transplantation this week.

The trial was conducted on three patients; two with extensive corneal damage resulting from multiple surgeries to remove ocular melanomas, and one with the genetic eye condition aniridia. Other causes of cornea damage can include chemical or thermal burns, bacterial infection and chemotherapy.

“The procedure is totally simple and cheap,” said lead author of the study, UNSW’s Dr Nick Di Girolamo. “Unlike other techniques, it requires no foreign human or animal products, only the patient’s own serum, and is completely non-invasive.

“There’s no suturing, there is no major operation: all that’s involved is harvesting a minute amount – less than a millimeter – of tissue from the ocular surface,” Dr Di Girolamo said.

“If you’re going to be treating these sorts of diseases in third world countries all you need is the surgeon and a lab for cell culture. You don’t need any fancy equipment.”

Because the procedure uses the patient’s own stem cells harvested from their eye, it is ideal for sufferers of unilateral eye disease. However, it also works in patients who have had both eyes damaged, Dr Di Girolamo said.

“One of our patients had aniridia, a congenital condition affecting both eyes. In that case, instead of taking the stem cells from the other cornea, we took them from another part of the eye altogether – the conjunctiva – which also harbours stem cells.

“The stem cells were able to change from the conjunctival phenotype to a corneal phenotype after we put them onto the cornea. That’s the beauty of stem cells,” Dr Di Girolamo said.

The therapeutic contact lens used in the trial was of a type commonly used worldwide after ocular surface surgery. However, of the several brands on the market, only one was suitable for growing the stem cells.

“We don’t know why. It’s probably to do with the components the manufacturers have used in that particular lens,” Dr Di Girolamo said.

The researchers are hopeful the technique can be adapted for use in other parts of the eye, such as the retina, and even in other organs. “If we can do this procedure in the eye, I don’t see why it wouldn’t work in other major organs such as the skin, which behaves in a very similar way to the cornea,” Dr Di Girolamo said.

Dr Di Girolamo’s team included UNSW medical scientists Professor Denis Wakefield and Dr Stephanie Watson. via UNSW

Michio Kaku On Aliens On Physics and the why we have not found them.