posted Wed 20 Dec 2006 by Michael Galloy under
Admin
I have always found Carl Sagan’s image of the “pale blue dot” to be inspiring. Here’s part of a public lecture on October 13, 1994 about our small dot in the universe:
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.
This post is motivated by the Carl Sagan blog-a-thon.
I like using links to the 
