Pale Blue Dot

[Guest guest]

>From Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space by Carl Sagan,

Random House, 1994)

 

 

Earth (the dot in the middle) as seen from 3.7 billion miles

away by the Voyager 1 spacecraft, on 6/6/1990.

... 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 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.