I have been meaning to post this for some time and for one reason or another, I just haven't
gotten around to it. Given recent events though, it has come to my attention again. This, I think,
will help explain my feelings towards the conflict in Iraq and elsewhere for that matter. I know
that when I first read and saw it, my perspective was forever altered. Thank you Dr. Sagan,
wherever you are. The orginal source can be found at
The Planetary Society's website.
An
Excerpt from A Pale Blue Dot
by Carl Sagan
This excerpt 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. Image: JPL/NASA .
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Earth, as seen by Voyager 1 at a distance of 4 billion miles.
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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.
