Pale Blue Dot
A great picture of earth... over 4 Billion miles away!!!! This was shot by the Voyager Spacecraft in 1990 and gives a great idea of just how small we really are. This is an excerpt of my favorite scientist's reaction to this picture.
Carl Sagan:
"We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and if you look at it, you see a 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.
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."
"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."
I somehow feel the need to help people be more aware of how big the universe is. It amazes me that so many people just don't seem to care, or choose not to care. Sagan's response, if heeded by humanity, would bind us together despite our differences. It smacks of Ecclesiastes and the author's realization that "everything is meaningless" which I don't take at face value, but am reminded that I am not important on my own. I as a part of humanity on the whole am a piece of something that is anything but meaningless.
