It’s the twentieth anniversary of the famous “pale blue dot” photo – Earth as seen from Voyager 1 while on the edge of our solar system (approximately 3,762,136,324 miles from home). Sagan’s words are always worth remembering:
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.
Man, Carl, you were awesome...and still are!
There's so much more to read about this--hit up that jmlynch link for more of Sagan's insanely wise words!
And if you've never seen it, or haven't seen it in a while, I HIGHLY recommend checking out Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" series from the 1970s. The FX are dated, the tone is a little cheesy, but the science, the facts, the awe--is timeless. Netflix has it on Instant Watch, so for ten bucks you can watch the entire series, assuming you get it done in a month. Not a bad deal. Cheaper than a night at the movies and infinitely more inspirational.
Humanity was robbed when Carl Sagan passed.
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