That's us ☝️
☝️
Yes that
Pale Blue Dot
On September 1977, NASA launched Voyager 1 .
It's official mission was supposed to end in 1980.
But 40 years later, it's still operating.
In August 2012, it left the Solar System. The farthest man-made object has reached.
In case aliens find it, it's packed with a disk that contains basic information about us:
- Photos of people, animals, and plants
- Music
- Greetings in 50 languages
- How to locate Earth (probably not a good idea 😬)
- Random things like how to eat an ice cream...etc
In 1990, NASA took picture of Earth from Voyager 1, 3.7 billion miles away.
This was the request of Astronomer and host of the original Cosmos show Carl Sagan.
Earth's most distant selfie 😜
The following excerpt is from
Carl Sagan's book Pale Blue Dot
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 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
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, 1994.
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Pale Blue Dot
By Jebena ☕️
