Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. 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. 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. 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. 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. It’s hard to truly grasp the incredible vastness of space.

Carl sagan pale blue dot quote