The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. 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.
On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.
Wikipedia gives a smaller section of this quote, but I prefer the whole thing:įrom this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. Sagan, who wrote a book by the same name, talks about the photo he helped create. Titled the Pale Blue Dot, this is the furthest photo from earth, of earth, ever taken. Earth, being around 6 billion kilometers away, is only a fraction of a pixel. In 1990, at the request of Carl Sagan, NASA turned the cameras from Voyager 1 back towards earth. It’s equally hard to grasp how tiny humanity is. "There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world," wrote Sagan when the iconic image was first revealed to the world.It’s hard to truly grasp the incredible vastness of space. It was his idea for Voyager to turn around and take the opportunity to image Earth and its companions before its mission to the edges of the Solar System took it too far away.
Sagan himself was instrumental in the photo being taken.
The term “Pale Blue Dot” was coined by Sagan as he reflected on the significance of the photograph, which portrays Earth as a small, insignificant dot in what appears to be a beam of light (but is actually lens flare) in a vast cosmos. Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot: A Vision Of The Human Future In Space was published in 1994, inspired by the famous 1990 Pale Blue Dot photograph taken by the Voyager 1 space probe before it traveled out of the Solar System and into interstellar space.
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