How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. 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. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every 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. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. We succeeded in taking that picture, and, if you look at it, you see a dot. Voyager 1, which had completed its primary mission and was leaving the Solar System, was commanded by NASA to turn its camera around and take one last photograph of Earth across a great expanse of space, at the request of astronomer and author Carl Sagan.ĭuring a public lecture at Cornell University in 1994, Sagen presented the image to the audience and shared his reflections on the deeper meaning behind the idea of the Pale Blue Dot:
In the photograph, Earth’s apparent size is less than a pixel the planet appears as a tiny dot against the vastness of space, among bands of sunlight scattered by the camera’s optics. Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of planet Earth taken on February 14, 1990, by the Voyager 1 space probe from a record distance of about 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles). Here be AWEsome! My thanks to Wikipedia and for the resources used in this post. Carl Sagan’s immortal words in 1994, contemplating the human place in the Cosmos.
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