Recently I came across this picture while surfing the net while looking for something totally random.
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| Pale Blue Dot |
This is the picture of our blue planet seen from Voyager I in 1990 some 3.7 billion miles away. When I saw the picture, it was quite a humbling experience for me. We seem to be living our lives on that little dot and in our own egotistical world we think every moment is so important. We strive for power, for money, for love, for adulation, and for so much more. Yet we are so insignificant in the whole scheme of things.....
As I was lost in these thoughts, I came across the words of a great man expressing the same thoughts much more eloquently than I ever can. So, here are his words. May be this picture will touch you the way it touched me.
"But for us, it's different. 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 in 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 the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. 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. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, 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 and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known." -- Carl Sagan, from "Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space".
