02/12/2010
This excerpt from A Pale Blue Dot was inspired
by an image taken, at Sagan's suggestion, by Voyager 1 on February 14,
1990. As the spacecraft left our planetary neighborhood for the
fringes of the solar system, engineers turned it around for one
last look at its home planet. Voyager 1 was about 6.4 billion
kilometers (4 billion miles) away, and approximately 32 degrees
above the ecliptic plane, when it captured this portrait of our
world. Caught in the center of scattered light rays (a result of taking
the picture so close to the Sun), Earth appears as a tiny point of
light, a crescent only 0.12 pixel in size.
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, Pale Blue Dot, 1994
