Reid Gower
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 4 months, 2011–2016
3:12 · 3.2M views · Jan 9, 2011
A short unofficial NASA-style spot from Reid Gower's Sagan Series, setting Carl Sagan's words about humanity spreading through the Solar System to visuals and music.
Recommended as a motivating, long-horizon vision that puts everyday concerns in perspective.
4 comments from Hacker News
The Frontier Is Everywhere – the first video in the Sagan Series by Reid Gower: this video It gives me the motivation to work towards a goal which lies tens, hundreds, maybe a thousand years in the future. Seeing this video puts my own selfish needs and feelings in perspective, and inspires me to do my little part in making humanity just a little bit better.
“Our remote descendants, safely arrayed on many worlds throughout the Solar System and beyond, will be unified by their common heritage, by their regard for their home planet, and by the knowledge that, whatever other life may be, the only humans in all the Universe come from Earth. They will gaze up and strain to find the blue dot in their skies. They will love it no less for its obscurity and fragility. They will marvel at how vulnerable the repository of all our potential once was, how perilous our infancy, how humble our beginnings, how many rivers we had to cross before we found our way.” ~ Carl Sagan. Bonus: with music this video
Check out Reid Gower's videos as well, the Sagan Series, a collection of videos he did that also used Carl Sagan's voice. this video And of course, Cosmos, which is where all the audio is from in all these videos [LINK]
"How does making you see things that aren't real challenge any hierarchies?" While LSD and psilocybin do sometimes cause people to hallucinate, this is only one small part of the psychedelic experience. The real value is in how the drugs change your thinking. It would take an entire book to explain this, but here are a few YouTube videos to give you the basic idea: [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] It's difficult to explain how exactly they challenge hierarchies, but the 35,000 foot overview would be that psychedelics tend to make one more prosocial, whereas hierarchies tend to be fueled by antisocial behaviors. They also tend to give one self-confidence and internalize one's locus of control, whereas again hierarchies can only exist when people lack self-confidence and have relatively external locii of control. Essentially hierarchies are built on the backs of those trying to fill some sort of void in their lives, whereas psychedelics undermine this by giving one perspective and making one whole. Here is the best description I've found: "What is the psychedelic experience? For me it's the full and overwhelming realization of all the beauty, love, and pain, the wonder and possibility, of the human experience. For the first time you see your life truly objectively, what's going wrong, and what's going right. You grasp and grapple with how you can do better, and you are overcome by the newfound desire to strengthen your community, your relationships, and your karma. And so it proceeds for t