our home, just a pale blue dot
Pale Blue Dot – Carl Sagan
On February 14, 1990, NASA commanded the Voyager 1 spacecraft, having completed its primary mission, to turn around to photograph the planets of the Solar System. One image Voyager returned was of Earth, showing up as a “pale blue dot” in the grainy photo.
Carl Sagan said the following quote on May 11, 1996
about what he felt the photo demonstrated.
“We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space],
and if you look at it,
you see a 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”.
earth
home
pale blue dot
universe
Carl Sagan
