With all of the racially-motivated violence taking place right now - at the hands of people on both sides of the issue - I've been thinking a lot lately about a very famous photograph taken by the Voyager 1 space probe (which you can find in ED on the outskirts of Sol). This beautiful photograph is a stark and poignant reminder of how truly small we are, and how "we're all in this together" is more than just lip service.
By the dawn of the '90s, Voyager's primary mission had been over for a decade. As it continued its journey toward the outer planets and beyond, famed astronomer Carl Sagan lobbied NASA to rotate one of its cameras back toward Earth for a final parting photograph. On February 14, 1990, at a distance of 6 billion kilometers, they did. The result was this remarkable image that has come to be known as the Pale Blue Dot.
The colored bands are reflections of sunlight off of the camera lens. At right-center, the tiny, blueish-white speck is Earth. It makes me feel special and unimportant at the same time. In his 1994 book, Carl Sagan reflected on the significance of this photograph. His words echo true today more than ever. I wish this world that's gone mad of late could see things through Carl's eyes. What a happier and healthier place this would be.
By the dawn of the '90s, Voyager's primary mission had been over for a decade. As it continued its journey toward the outer planets and beyond, famed astronomer Carl Sagan lobbied NASA to rotate one of its cameras back toward Earth for a final parting photograph. On February 14, 1990, at a distance of 6 billion kilometers, they did. The result was this remarkable image that has come to be known as the Pale Blue Dot.
The colored bands are reflections of sunlight off of the camera lens. At right-center, the tiny, blueish-white speck is Earth. It makes me feel special and unimportant at the same time. In his 1994 book, Carl Sagan reflected on the significance of this photograph. His words echo true today more than ever. I wish this world that's gone mad of late could see things through Carl's eyes. What a happier and healthier place this would be.
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.
-- Carl Sagan
