Spew Muse @randywhorewall - Tumblr Blog

kosmos2999-deactivated20250928

Remembering Leonard Simon Nimoy was an American actor and director, famed for playing Spock in the Star Trek franchise for almost 50 years. This includes originating Spock in the original Star Trek series in 1966, then Star Trek: The Animated Series, the first six Star Trek films, and Star Trek: The Next Generation. Nimoy also directed films, including Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984), Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986), and Three Men and a Baby (1987), and appeared in several films, television shows, and voice acted in several video games. Outside of acting, Nimoy was a film director, photographer, author, singer, and songwriter.

Born March 26, 1931 Boston, Massachusetts, U.S. Died February 27, 2015 (aged 83) Los Angeles, California, U.S.

So many thanks to Space Woman Reporter News (Gettr: @Beatles1965JAD) for sharing!

randywhorewall

Leonard Nimoy's last Tweet (now X) was appropriate.

lindam54

On Valentine’s Day 36 years ago, at the request of Carl Sagan, NASA turned Voyager 1's camera back toward home for one last look.

From 3.7 billion miles away, it captured this: a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

Here is how Carl Sagan beautifully described it:

“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 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.”

(Credit: @Saganism on X)

randywhorewall

I asked AI what that distance means in light-speed:

**3.7 billion miles** (3,700,000,000 miles) is the famous distance from which NASA's Voyager 1 took the iconic **Pale Blue Dot** photograph of Earth in 1990.

In terms of light speed (the speed of light in vacuum is approximately **186,282 miles per second**), light takes about **5.5 hours** to travel that distance.

Here's the breakdown:

- Time in seconds: ≈ 19,862 seconds

- Time in minutes: ≈ 331 minutes

- Time in hours: **≈ 5.52 hours** (or roughly **5 hours and 31 minutes**)

- Time in days: ≈ 0.23 days

This is equivalent to about **5.5 light-hours** (the distance light travels in 5.5 hours).

For context, that's roughly the time it takes light to cross much of the outer solar system (e.g., from the Sun to beyond Pluto/Neptune's orbit at that time). It's a tiny fraction of interstellar distances—about **0.00063 light-years** (or 0.63 thousandths of a light-year).