Pale Blue Dot

The following is an excerpt from a book "Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space" by an American astronomer Carl Sagan. It talks about a photograph of the planet Earth taken in 1990 by the Voyager 1 spacecraft from a record distance of about 6 billion kilometers from Earth. In the photograph, Earth is shown as a tiny dot (0.12 pixel in size) against the vastness of space. Referring to the tiny pale blue dot in the image, Sagan calls upon the humanity to live in harmony and take care of the planet that we all call home.

(see video at the end of transcript)

transcript:

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Considering in 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 in 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 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.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a 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 that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.