2020 remark: This article was first published in 2010 under the name Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan.
I just heard this marvellous speech of Professor Carl Sagan. I think this speech is very straight to the point and make us realise how small are we and how important the Earth means to us. So I decide to post it here for more people can see/hear about it.
Pale Blue Dot
Professor Carl Sagan (1934-1996)
From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of particular interest.
But for us, it’s different.
Consider again 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 harbour 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.
The Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of planet Earth taken in 1990 by Voyager 1 from a record distance, showing it against the vastness of space. By request of Carl Sagan, NASA commanded the Voyager 1 spacecraft, having completed its primary mission and now leaving the Solar System, to turn its camera around and to take a photograph of Earth across a great expanse of space.
Subsequently, the title of the photograph was used by Sagan as the primary title of his 1994 book, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space.
In a 2001 article by Space.com, STScI’s Ray Villard and JPL’s Jurrie Van der Woude selected this photograph as one of the top ten space science images of all time.