Today is the 20th Anniversary of this photo. That tiny dot is our planet taken from a view no human has ever seen. When the Voyager Spacecraft turned around to take the photo, a reflection on the space craft caused what looks like a ray of sunlight to bath the planet. I think Carl Sagan summed it up best.
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.
Insane and amazing. And kind of scary. And awesome.
ReplyDeleteI always find something like that to be inspiring. We are giving a very limited time on an extremely limited area. Let's make the most of it, let's make things better for those that come after us.
ReplyDeleteIt also angers me when we can look at a photo like this and know there are people on there that hold a mind set that was established long before an understanding of celestial mechanics started.