the tiny blue dot that we live in

Underscoring our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another

Carl Sagan said it best, reflecting on the significance of a photograph of planet Earth taken on February 14, 1990, by the Voyager 1 space probe from about 6 billion kilometers away. Our planet appeared in the photograph as a tiny distant pale blue pixel against a reflected band of sunlight. The picture famously became known as the Pale Blue Dot. Here's Sagan:

Source: Wikimedia Commons

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 . . . . 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 . . . . 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.

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