This
excerpt from A Pale Blue Dot was inspired by an image taken, at Carl
Sagan's suggestion, by Voyager 1 on February 14, 1990. As the spacecraft
left our planetary neighborhood for the fringes of the solar system,
engineers turned it around for one last look at its home planet. Voyager
1 was about 6.4 billion kilometers (4 billion miles) away, and
approximately 32 degrees above the ecliptic plane, when it captured this
portrait of our world. Caught in the center of scattered light rays (a
result of taking the picture so close to the Sun), Earth appears as a
tiny point of light, a crescent only 0.12 pixel in size.
Credits:
Music: Ludovico Einaudi with a track titled, very fittingly, "The Earth Prelude"
Initial clip collection: Levi Mills
Ending scene: The intro from "Contact", the motion picture based on Carl Sagan's novel by the same name
I take no credit for anything in this video.
For audio download/more, visit www.sagantime.com
———
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 (1934-1996)
excerpt from A Pale Blue Dot was inspired by an image taken, at Carl
Sagan's suggestion, by Voyager 1 on February 14, 1990. As the spacecraft
left our planetary neighborhood for the fringes of the solar system,
engineers turned it around for one last look at its home planet. Voyager
1 was about 6.4 billion kilometers (4 billion miles) away, and
approximately 32 degrees above the ecliptic plane, when it captured this
portrait of our world. Caught in the center of scattered light rays (a
result of taking the picture so close to the Sun), Earth appears as a
tiny point of light, a crescent only 0.12 pixel in size.
Credits:
Music: Ludovico Einaudi with a track titled, very fittingly, "The Earth Prelude"
Initial clip collection: Levi Mills
Ending scene: The intro from "Contact", the motion picture based on Carl Sagan's novel by the same name
I take no credit for anything in this video.
For audio download/more, visit www.sagantime.com
———
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 (1934-1996)
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