|
An
Excerpt from A Pale Blue Dot
by Carl Sagan
Co-founder of The Planetary Society
Carl
Sagan's thoughts on seeing our world as a "pale blue dot" set
in the vastness of space might provide some perspective on the
events of the past weeks. 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 .
|
|
|
Earth,
as seen by Voyager 1 at a distance of 4 billion miles.
Click on image for larger view.
|
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.
--Carl
Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994
Responses
to the Attacks on September 11, 2001
Show You Care - by Kathryn Sullivan
A Letter to The Planetary Society - by
Konstantin M. Pichkhadze
An Eye-Witness Account - by Neil
deGrasse Tyson
World
Watch - by Dr. Louis Friedman
 Site
Map
Copyright (c) 2001 The Planetary Society. All rights reserved.
|
|
