Notices by zrb (zrb@astrodon.social)

the view inland from a small town on the coast

coastal upwelling makes for great colors

On February 14th, 1990, at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (#JPL) in Pasadena, California, the operators of #Voyager1 were preparing to shut down the probe's camera system for the final time. Since launching in 1977, the spacecraft had performed close flybys of Jupiter and Saturn and was using its kinetic energy from the gravitational slingshot to head toward the edge of our solar system, the so-called "termination shock" where the solar wind meets interstellar space. Out so far from everything, and with dwindling electrical output from the plutonium generator, it didn’t make much sense to keep the camera operating and consuming power with nothing left to see.

There WAS one final thing left to see, however; the spacecraft’s distant position allowed it a unique view of our entire solar system. Recognizing this, the mission planners decided that before they shut down the camera system for good, Voyager 1 would look back and take one last series of photos: a so-called "family portrait" of every planet together.

Here is the result:

Here's the full image of Earth. From the great distance that #Voyager1 had traveled (6 billion kilometers), you can just barely see our planet as a pale, blue dot amid one of the shafts of sunlight on the camera sensor.

Carl Sagan wrote the following words about this specific image in 1994, in a book he fittingly titled "Pale Blue Dot":

> "Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, 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 "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there -- on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam."

> "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."

> "The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. 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. 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."

> “The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.”

https://www.ice.gov/webform/ice-tip-form

I specifically advise against flooding the ICE tip form with false reports in order to waste their time sifting through false information.

If you were to do that, which again I think you should not do, you should also NOT do it from a cafe or library so that ICE doesn't know your home IP address, and you should NOT use a hardened browser that reduces the ability for the site to fingerprint you.

That would be illegal, and as we all know the law is the arbiter of morality and going against the law is wrong, even if that law is unjust and hurts your friends and neighbors.

@dalias I'm very open to references / suggestions on how to set it up!

@dalias ah shit ah fuck, now I gotta go back to square one in finding a privacy-respecting email service

if only self-hosting an email server (and then making sure outgoing emails are actually received and not blocked) weren't such a gargantuan torture

some dude at JPL noticed in 1964 that, starting in the late 70s, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune would all align in such a way that a space probe, if launched in August 1977 with a specific velocity, would be able to make close gravity assists of all of them in succession

Thirteen years later, #Voyager1 and #Voyager2 launched from Cape Canaveral Florida, loaded with cameras, magnetometers, and plasma detectors. This animation shows the gravity assists that Voyager 2 made between 1977 and 1989, and then its accelerated path outwards up until 2000 where it leaves the frame.

47 years later, Voyager 1 and 2 are still out there, sending faint signals back to Earth (though many of their instruments are now either failing or shut down to conserve power as the plutonium generators run out of heat).

@AnarchoNinaWrites for people who, here and elsewhere in the months leading up to the election, so smugly talked about being "grownups" and "putting on my big boy pants instead of making the choice that makes me feel good", their strategy sure seems like it fucking sucked in every way

and, it turns out, lots of people apparently love to put all the blame on minorities and "radicals" and fantasize about fascists attacking them

#threads is only federating and integrating ActivityPub so it can 1) dominate code contributions and steer the protocol in a corporate-friendly direction, and then 2) eventually discard it in favor of a closed protocol, using some excuse of “increased security” or “innovative new technology”. No more, and no less. Apple and Google did the exact same thing to #XMPP.