Hello space fans and welcome to a
special episode of The Planetary Post. As
we draw closer to the end of the year,
I thought it would be nice for me to read
some of the most inspirational and
poignant words ever written about our
planet: an excerpt from Carl Sagan's
famous book, Pale Blue Dot. Back in
1990 the Voyager spacecraft
turned back and took a photo of Earth from
about 6 billion kilometers away.
The following are Mr. Sagan's musings on
our home, the 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 have 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.
