Earth Day on the Pale Blue Dot

This Earth Day of April 22, 2022, is a good time to stop and reflect a moment on our home in the universe. We live on a gleaming blue and white wet rock hurtling around a yellow star in a cosmos so vast that it is well beyond our ability to comprehend. On February 14, 1990, a photo looking back at Earth was taken from a distance of 4 billion miles by the space probe Voyager 1 on its way out of the solar system. This photo features a tiny, pixel-sized, blue dot. Our lonely home world.

So far, this decade of the 2020’s has begun with global contagion and a growing standoff by nuclear powers over culture and real estate. Many are saying that the conflict will lead to famine in Africa and economic chaos elsewhere. How it unfolds is the question on everyone’s mind. If there was ever a time for us to take a pause to look at the big picture, that time is now. We could all use a bit of humility from time to time.

Someone once joked that the international unit of humility should be called the “Sagan.” Carl Sagan the astronomer was a gifted and popular spokesman for astronomy and space science in a time of great discovery and space exploration in the latter 1900’s. Carl Sagan the writer is said to have published more than 600 scientific papers and 20 books for lay audiences. What’s more, in addition to co-writing and narrating a popular TV series, he wrote a piece of science fiction, Contact, that was turned into a popular movie.

Sagan wrote the following-

“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.”

— Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994

Copyright © 1994 by Carl Sagan, Copyright © 2006 by Democritus Properties, LLC.