Wednesday, June 6, 2007

Pale Blue Dot

I have wanted to post this Carl Sagan quote for a while. I initially saw a video with the quote below a few months ago. I will add the video later (the computer that I typically post from has lots of security filters and will not allow access to most videos, especially YouTube). Regardless, it is a great quote.

This picture was taken approximately 4 billion miles away from Earth by the Voyager 1 Satellite.

"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 master 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 no where else, at least [for the foreseeable] future . . . Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
. . . 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

3 comments:

linsey said...

I love that you posted this. There is something so oddly calming in feeling small and insignificant. It makes my problems seem even smaller than I am and I am smaller than tiny from 4 billion miles away.

Michelle said...

This is such a Tittle quote. Regardless of your Godlessness (as per Ann Coutler) (Just Kidding), I think this is a really interesting quote. Thinking of things that way definitely has a way of giving perspective.

Anonymous said...

Behold, the nations are like a drop from a bucket, and are accounted as the dust on the scales; behold, he takes up the isles like fine dust. All the nations are as nothing before him, they are accounted by him as less than nothing and emptiness. To whom then will you liken God, or what likeness compare with him?
~ Isaiah 40:15 / 17-18