February 14th 1990
6.4 billion kilometers from
Planet Earth, Voyager 1, a space probe,
approached the edge of our solar system.
Engineers, at Carl Sagan's suggestion, turned
the probe around for a final look at
Earth. A mere 0.12 pixel speck in
space, Earth appears as a tiny, pale blue
dot.
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,"
"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.
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.
