Pale Blue Dot

Take a good look at the picture. It is taken by NASA's Voyager 1 on 14th Feb 1990, to capture how the planet we call "HOME" looks, from 6 Billion Kilometers. At the time the picture was taken, the spacecraft Voyager 1 didn't even cross our very Solar System. See how tiny and lost our Earth looks in the picture, it didn't even occupy 1 pixel (actually its 0.12 pixel), and it took 5 1/2hrs for the each pixel of the picture to reach Earth even while travelling at the speed of Light. It’s not even as big as a speck of dust we see every day. But that’s where we all are, on that small speck. After seeing this picture it makes very hard for everyone to imagine our place in the Universe, when compared with the space and time frame at which the Universe operates we don't even stand a chance. But still this is where it all happens.

Even though the tiny dot looks so insignificant in the picture, it is very important to our existence, because that is all we have got. The entire human History will be equivalent to a picosecond for this Universe and even for Earth too, I hope there comes one day on which everybody respect these facts.

The man behind this photograph is the visionary scientist and astronomer Carl Sagan. And this is what he said about the picture,

"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

Now if you can, please read what Carl said once again.