On September 6, 1977, NASA launched its Voyager 1 spacecraft. In 1990, after passing the orbits of Pluto and Neptune, NASA used their on-board cameras to look back toward Earth and snap a photograph.
This is what they received:
The bands of light seen here are due to sunlight being scattered by the camera’s optics, but look closely at the right-most band of light. See that tiny blue dot?
That’s us.
Carl Sagan:
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 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.
On March 27th, 2010, at 8:30 PM CDT, I’ll be participating in Earth Hour 2010. My wife and I will invite a few friends over, turn off the non-essential electronics in our home, light a few candles, and probably play a game or two of Catan. What will you do?
For a glimpse at some of the world’s most famous landmarks “going dark” during last year’s event, check out this collection of photographs from The Big Picture.
The goal of this event is to raise awareness for our role is perceived as man-made global warming, but it’s also an excuse to have some close friends over for an evening of fellowship.
