"That's home. Everyone you ever knew or ever heard of came from that tiny spot."It turns out that this is a paraphrase of what Carl Sagan wrote in his 1994 book, Pale Blue Dot, A Vision of the Human Future in Space about a composite picture of Earth taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft in 1990,
"From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of particular interest. 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 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."Yes, once again my own writing comes up short when you compare it with a good writer. That's just the way it is. Of course, Mr. Sagan is just talking about human civilization and leaves our the fact that God doesn't exist just on the "pale blue dot" but that's not the point he was trying to get across. I don't know if Mr. Sagan believed in God and I don't know if he was a Christian. But we can't just dismiss his words because he leaves out the fact that God, his Son and the Holy Spirit didn't originate on Earth. His are still thought provoking words.
It was Mr. Sagan who asked NASA to turn the Voyager 1 spacecraft around in its flight through our solar system to look back toward Earth and take a series of pictures. I mistakenly thought the view was taken from just past the orbit of Saturn. It turns out that this view was generated from the viewpoint of approximately 3.7 billion miles (6 billion kilometers) from Earth. That's beyond the orbit of Neptune and almost as far as Pluto's farthest distance from the Earth! The pictures from Voyager 1 aren't the pictures you see in the planetarium show. It was these pictures from Voyager 1 that inspired the view in Passport to the Universe. The image is much more clear in the planetarium show than the images that Voyager 1 sent back to Earth.
And before we get angry at the writers for the Passport to the Universe show for taking Mr. Sagan's words, keep in mind that one of the writers of the show was Ann Druyan, Carl Sagan's widow. I think she has a right to use them. If you are interested, there is more information about the images from Voyager 1 in Wikipedia in this article.
And yes, Mr. Sagan is wrong in saying,
"...in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves."There is help from elsewhere but he (Carl Sagan) probably didn't want to acknowledge that. Too bad.
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