Carl Sagan's Profound 'Pale Blue Dot'

Carl Sagan reciting “Pale Blue Dot”, an excerpt from his book Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, which he wrote after NASA released a photograph from 6.4 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles) away in 1990 that made the Earth appear as a pale blue dot.

NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft took an image of our home planet from 6.4 billion kilometers away. …Our co-founder Carl Sagan eloquently described what that image meant for humanity.

Sagan’s heartfelt words for humanity were quite prescient to the world we live in today.

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider again 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.