Reading time: 3 – 4 minutes

The Pale Blue Dot: Earth

More words of wisdom from Carl Sagan this week.  I have been thinking a lot about Sagan’s work and his thoughts about life on earth and in other places lately.  I rediscovered his work a few months ago and it couldn’t have been a better time to do so.  With the economic crisis in full effect and a number of other crises of varying degrees going on in the world I needed to get some higher level perspective on things.

Like Sagan, I find that learning more about the Cosmos and astronomy gives one the high level perspective they need.

Take a look at the picture above. See the pale blue dot in the middle?  That’s Earth.

The shot was taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft on February 14th 1990, almost 20 years ago today and about 12 years after Voyager 1 left Earth. The distance from Voyager to Earth when the photo was snapped was about 3.7 billion miles.  The photo was snapped at the insistence of Sagan who presumably thought it would help all of us gain some perspective, given that the “earthrise” photo from the Apollo missions decades earlier did just that.

Six years later in 1996 Sagan related his thoughts on the deeper meaning of the photograph for a commencement address.  Here are his thoughts:

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.