Hole in one? Win US$1 million!

While there may be a few challenging holes at Stonecutters Ridge (or in my case, all 18), none will compare to the 19th hole at the Legends Golf and Safari Resort, within the Entabeni Safari Conservancy in South Africa ’s north-eastern Limpopo Province. This tee-off point on top of a 430m mountain in South Africa is the hardest golf shot in the world, and more than $US1 million awaits the player who can score a hole in one. Players must take a helicopter to the top to play the longest – and highest – par three on the planet. Taking the shot also requires courage – a player needs to teeter terrifyingly close to the edge of the mammoth hillside.

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The pale blue dot

Above is a famous photograph taken of the Earth by Voyager 1 in 1990 from 4 billion miles away (about 6 light-hours). The late astronomer Carl Sagan called this view of Earth the “Pale Blue Dot”, and had this to say about the image:

“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.”

When we look at this image, you realize how utterly small and insignificant Earth really is…

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