This little bit of prose, written by someone who has more facility with language that I will ever hope to obtain, has come to mean a great deal to me and I was reminded of it recently. I thought I'd give you a break from my disjointed, brain dump style of writing and let you read some really important big ideas. The impetus for this was the following photograph, taken by Voyager 1 just as it reached the edge of our solar system. Carl Sagan asked for this... and being Carl Sagan, I guess, he got what he wanted. NASA complied. Voyager 1 turned its camera around and took this picture of earth - the farthest picture ever taken of our planet.
Here's what Carl had to say, contemplating this picture:
From this distant vantage point, the
Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different.
Consider again 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, 1994