I'm gonna take this opportunity to get a little corny; if you have a weak stomach, skip to the next comment.

This video, and most like it, make me tear up. It seems as time goes on, I come to this place (the sift) more and more just to get my fill of all that is wrong with people on this planet. It's great to feel a sense of purpose by showing myself who and what I'm up against in this world, but from creation science to multinational corporate control to a disinterested population growing out of control, it can get a little overwhelming. When I'm confronted with how amazing things really are around here, geologically or otherwise, I still get wide-eyed and I feel like I'm in fourth grade again, learning that earthworms can actually regrow parts of their bodies. I guess this place is a real mixed bag, and the extremes are getting more and more extreme. Or maybe I'm just growing older and seeing things a little differently.

Or maybe I've just got problems.

Anyway, thanks for a touch of the old catharsis, Eric. Sometimes, I think we're all guilty of forgetting what's good.

Beautiful vid.  Thanks Eric.

The *music is really perfect too.

Adding video to channels (Music) - requested by arvana.

... 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.

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. 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 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.

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. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

-Carl Sagan

Need a HD one!

I love these kinds of sifts Its stuff like this that made me join the sift too You know the *music does fit well, but also am I the only one here who finds watching stuff lke this makes you *happy?

Invocations (happy, music) cannot be called by Zonbie because Zonbie is not privileged - sorry.

7 more votes sifty...7 more votes...

Ol' mother natures a ruthless bitch ain't she??? Her cousin Lady Luck's a piece a work, too....

Great Video Eric...Great Video.

Absolutely beautiful.

When you watch it, put yourself in the mindset that you are viewing footage captured on some alien planet. It really makes you appreciate it so much more.

Billions of years have wrought a civilization of beings lucky enough to truly appreciate such beauty. Can you do that, SiftBot? Didn't think so.

*doublepromote to inspire awe in everyone else.

Double-Promoting this video back to the front page; last published Saturday, May 3rd, 2008 9:42am PDT - doublepromote requested by lucky760.

If I'm not mistaken, every bit of this is clips taken from the Planet Earth series that was on Discovery a while back.

Planet Earth series really produced some amazing shots

I've seen a lot of clips on the sift put to the "Pale Blue Dot" speech. (or whatever you want to call it)

I'm tempted to say the I can't vote for it because if you type (pale+blue+dot) into the search window, you'll get seven other clips like it. And that's not accounting for all the ones that are inappropriately tagged.

That being said, I still never get tired of watching them. I love that feeling I get when I stare into space through some hubble image or try to imagine the sheer scale of what we can see. I love that there is so much out there that we don't know. I wish everyone else was as humbled by it as some of you appear to be.

This and the well written comments here made my day. Thank you thank you thank you! The feeling of wonder and awe never gets old.

*music is nice on this clip too

Adding video to channels (Music) - requested by Zonbie.

AHA! AHAAAAAAA! It works! my shiny gold star works

I'll shut now, but I still think this video is brilliant

Just makes me feel good. *promote

Self promoting this video back to the front page; last published Saturday, May 3rd, 2008 11:40pm PDT - promote requested by original submitter eric3579.

Thanks Eric. This really is a beautiful video...makes me want to grow wings and fly around the world.

*happy