Pale
Blue Dot
Caption
It was Carl Sagan's idea to turn Voyager's camera back toward
the planet that launched the spacecraft in order to reveal to that
planet's inhabitants their "true circumstance and condition."
After much resistance, Dr. Sagan prevailed, and on February 14, 1990,
from a distance of 6.4 billion kilometers, Voyager 1 captured this
image of our Earth. Here the entire world fills only 0.12 pixel and
appears as a tiny crescent of light. The apparent rays of light are
not sunbeams, but scattering off the camera's optics, a result of
pointing it so close to the Sun. Now one of the most famous images
ever taken from space, this humbling perspective of our beloved home
is a part of Dr. Sagan's invaluable legacy. Image: JPL/NASA
Text
from Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, Random House, 1994
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.
Copyright © The Estate of Carl Sagan
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