In his book Pale Blue Dot, astronomer Carl Sagan, wrote about being inspired by an image of earth. On February 14, 1990, as the craft Voyager 1 was 6.4 billion kilometers (4 billion miles) away from where it was launched, it turned toward earth to take one last image. It captured a pale blue dot in a ray of light coming from the sun.
Sagan wrote the following:
“Consider 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 video below captures Sagan reading his words. Check it out.
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