What would I like for people to say after I'm dead?
"He was a good man."
I have many miles to go. Or maube not, 69 is coming soon.
Carl Sagan was a good man. It's his birthday.
He
wrote our mission statement on this pale blue dot.
Today is the the anniversary of Carl Sagan's birth in 1934 and the day we celebrate his life, teachings and wisdom.
The image mentioned is The Pale Blue Dot. It is a photograph of Earth taken Feb. 14, 1990, by NASA’s Voyager 1 at a distance of 3.7 billion miles. Mr. Sagan shared his thoughts about this image in his book, The Pale Blue Dot. His words are timeless but also seem particularly relevant at this point in time.
“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.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. 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. 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.
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. Our planet 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, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
