The Earth-Luna System - Dance seen from 31 MegaMiles away

[YankeyMCC]

or as the NASA site titled it: NASA's Deep Impact Films Earth as an Alien World

(snip)
COLLEGE PARK, Md. -- NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft has created a video of the moon transiting (passing in front of) Earth as seen from the spacecraft's point of view 31 million miles away. Scientists are using the video to develop techniques to study alien worlds.

"Making a video of Earth from so far away helps the search for other life-bearing planets in the Universe by giving insights into how a distant, Earth-like alien world would appear to us," said University of Maryland astronomer Michael A’Hearn, principal investigator for the Deep Impact extended mission, called EPOXI.
(snip)

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/solarsystem/features/epoxi_transit.html

[Book Lover]

1. I don't mind revoicing this phrase...

Big blue marble in space! How beautiful is that?

[grantcart]

2. I couldn't see any of the lines between countries that show up on our maps

Did they photoshop the boundaries out?

[YankeyMCC]

3. They washed out alll the colors to

all green and blue and brown and white sort of mashed and spread around not clear and solid over each nation.

[Peace Patriot]

4. What an awesome sight! Could it be any clearer how fragile this little blue ball of life is,

how dependent we all are on its thin skein of atmosphere, water and biodiversity, and how we are all in this together?

Whatever we may find of life elsewhere in the 100 billion stars of our own galaxy or in the 100 billion galaxies in the estimable universe, there is one thing certain about it: It will be a long, long, long, L-O-O-O-O-O-ONG ways away. We are, effectively, all there is of intelligent life--us and probably the dolphins, whales, elephants and a few other of our companions on planet earth--in our neighborhood, and will likely remain so, even if intelligent beings from elsewhere were to contact us tomorrow. Unless they have technological or telepathic powers--or powers that we know not of--that are many magnitudes beyond our own, we certainly won't see them, or go there, for eons of time; further, communication is severely limited by the speed of light, and can go no faster (that we know of), so, a message from outer space will likely be from a civilization long expired, as our own likely will be, when any message from us may reach some other sentient race. Carl Sagan's book and movie, "Contact," posits a superior race providing us with a machine that can travel worm holes to...well, I won't give it away. And that is not outside the realm of possibility. But you have to ask, why would they do that? Surely, a civilization that highly evolved would have learned the lesson about interfering with less developed societies.

Anyway, that's what strikes me about this latest "little blue marble" picture: We are on our own, and the very success of the human race has put us, and all our companions--fast being extirpated, by us, everywhere on earth--in the gravest peril. We have nothing else; nowhere else to go to; no other habitable environment. This is it--and the rest is at the other end of a journey, across staggering distances of emptiness, where we cannot yet go. And there is no other orb within our reach--in our solar system--that could be 'terraformed' quickly enough to save us, if this orb fails. (That seems evident from the planetary probes--there are fascinating planets and moons--none are habitable by us.) We must save earth, or else we are committing suicide...for the likes of Exxon Mobil, Dick Cheney, Prince Bandar and brethren.

[El Supremo]

5. I already saw that movie