The Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan

Video Description

On Valentine’s Day in 1990, a small machine nearly four billion miles from home turned around to take one last photograph — not of a planet, not of a star, but of us. NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft, twelve years and billions of miles into a journey that began in 1977, had already rewritten everything we thought we knew about Jupiter and Saturn. Now, past the outermost planets and hurtling out of the Solar System, its cameras were pointed back toward the pale blue planet it had left behind. From six billion kilometers away — 40.5 times the distance between Earth and the Sun — the shutter opened, and in that one frame, all of human history became a single, faint, almost invisible pixel.

The photograph almost never happened. It was never part of the mission plan, and more than a few engineers feared it would waste precious resources or even burn out the camera by aiming so close to the Sun’s glare. But Carl Sagan — astronomer, storyteller, and the boundless poet of Cosmos — had spent years quietly campaigning for exactly this picture: one final, humbling portrait of our only home, taken from the farthest reach of human reach. His stubborn request came from a profound hunch — that nothing would teach us more about who we are than the chance to see, with our own instruments, how small we truly are.

The Pale Blue Dot is the seed of everything Roxz.tv stands for. Before a person can break their chains, they must first see the cage; before personal sovereignty is possible, there must first be Perspective. The Pale Blue Dot gives us that Cosmic Perspective — a single image that dissolves arrogance, awakens awe, and encourages unity – all in a single glimpse.

Friends and lovers and future lovers – That’s here. That’s home. That’s us.

THE PALE BLUE DOT:

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.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings. How eager they are to kill one another. How fervent their hatreds.

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. It is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit? Yes. Settle? Not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. 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.

~ Carl Sagan 1994