A Small Blue Marble

Human civilization is a very new and very small and very fleeting thing in the universe. To help keep things in perspective:

Pictures of a near neighbor which is only 764 times larger than Earth (in volume.)

Two men who have gone farther from Earth than any others in human history, except a few of their friends who took the same trip. How far? About 1.2 "light seconds". (A light second is the distance light travels in one second.) Doesn't sound so far when you remember that the sun is eight light-minutes away, and the nearest of the stars, four light-years.

The Chicago Tribune has a little more with these two.

A bunch of people who are trying to do other things unique in human history... (involving pizza, and tea parties, and rattlesnakes, and Michael Jackson.)

There's a movie doing the festival circuit called Ever Since the World Ended.

After civilization ends, how will you be able to navigate?

A new group is taking votes on The Seven Wonders of the Modern World All man made, as were the originals. Six of the original seven are gone. The Great Pyramids remain, and I voted for them, along with the Great Wall of China, the Easter Island Heads, Petra, Stonehenge, the Colosseum in Rome, and the Acropolis.

Physics for Future Presidents tells world leaders what they need to know about "nukes" and radioactivity and the technologies that come from quantum mechanics...

Nasa shows us a movie of the Earth shrinking in the rear view mirror as one of their probes leaves for another planet.

Pictures of the shuttle lifting off from a unique point of view although probably not the ISS according to the MeFi thread that followed...

And finally, to provide a little perspective for US readers: how the rest of the world reacted to our recent elections.