Reflections on a Mote of Dust -- Carl Sagan (1934-1996)

This classic photograph of the Earth was taken on December 7, 1972. The original caption is reprinted below:

View of the Earth as seen by the Apollo 17 crew traveling toward the moon. This translunar coast photograph extends from the Mediterranean Sea area to the Antarctica south polar ice cap. This is the first time the Apollo trajectory made it possible to photograph the south polar ice cap. Note the heavy cloud cover in the Southern Hemisphere. Almost the entire coastline of Africa is clearly visible. The Arabian Peninsula can be seen at the northeastern edge of Africa. The large island off the coast of Africa is the Malagasy Republic. The Asian mainland is on the horizon toward the northeast.

'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 ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every 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, Pale Blue Dot

The image is from Voyager 1 , 1990

Voyager 1 , launched on September 5 1977 is still traveling out there in the universe and is currently (in 2008) in the termination shock (The termination shock is the point in the heliosphere where the solar wind slows down to subsonic speed (with respect to the star) due to interactions with the local interstellar medium) of our Sun.

On it is the Golden Record, containing info about the Earth , Man, the diversity of the human cultures, sounds images, languages and even some thoughts in binary format for any human or other civilizations listening out there.

Carl Sagan did not see this picture of the Earth as seen from Mars taken from Mars Global Surveyor in 2003. But he would have loved it!


So when I look up in the night sky and see the stars, when I'm in need of comfort, I think of us here, on a pale blue dot........all of the human dreams and beauty and art and .... everything that Humanity is......4.5 billion years for Earth to become what it has become.....that's quite a journey...Carl said everything much more eloquently than I ever could.....my soul is in those words above......

So the pair of eyes that stare into mine should share the same......