Thirty years ago, a spacecraft called Voyager 1 snapped a photograph of where it came from. The result remains the furthest perspective we have looking back on our home planet. If you are reading this (as opposed to listening), you will find that photograph copied below. In the bottom right quadrant, you can hardly see a pale blue dot. That is Earth. The photograph has a name. It is called Pale Blue Dot. It was taken at the request of author and astronomer Carl Sagan. He wrote a book called Pale Blue Dot. Along with the photograph, below is a short passage from his book. It does not rhyme, but it reads like poetry to me.
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.
