The Pale Blue Dot

From Saturn I knew, the Earth would appear too small for the Voyagers to make out any detail.

Our planet would be just a point of light, a lonely pixel.

Hardly distinguishable from many other points of lights the Voyager would see nearby planets, far-off suns.

But precisely because of obscurity of our world thus revealed such picture might be worth having.

While almost everyone is thought that the Earth is a sphere with all of us somehow glued to it by gravity.

the reality of our circumstance did not really begin to sink in until the famous frame film Apollo photograph of the whole Earth.

the one taken by the Apollo 17 astronauts on the last journey of humans to the moon.

It seemed to me that another picture of the Earth, this one taken from a hundred thousand times farther away might help in continuing process of revealing to ourselves our true circumstance and condition.

It had been well understood by the scientists and philosophers of classical antiquity that the Earth was a mere point in a vast encompassing Cosmos.

But no one had seen it as such.

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 general and emperors so that in glory and triumph they can 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.