The Pale Blue Dot (A Reflection on Earth Day)

Carl Sagan begins his book Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, with a discussion of that remarkable photo of planet earth taken by Voyager 1 in 1990: now known as the “Pale Blue Dot.” The photo was snapped from 3.7 billion miles away from our planet.

NASA, Public Domain, Wiki Commons

Sagan writes,

From this distance the planets seem only points of light, smeared or unsmeared–even through the high-resolution telescope aboard Voyager. They are like planets seen with the naked eye from the surface of the Earth–luminous dots, brighter than most of the stars…You cannot tell merely by looking at one of these dots what it’s like, what’s on it, what its past has been, and whether, in this particular epoch, anyone lives there. (5)

But for us, it’s different. 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 saints 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 is a vast, cosmic arena. (6)

In chapel yesterday, my colleague, Dr. Demian Wheeler, gave a brief reflection. After reading those words from Sagan, he shared the following brief meditation (and he gave me permission to share them here):

Tomorrow is Earth Day. And today we gather to honor the sacred depths of nature, to extol its splendor and majesty and to stand and tremble in reverence before its overwhelming and often terrifying power. We express awe, wonder, and gratitude for the infinite contingencies that had to occur in order to arrive at this very moment; we ponder the sheer mystery of why there is anything at all rather than nothing; we contemplate our smallness as well as our specialness in the vast sweep of cosmic history; we acknowledge our dependence—our absolute dependence—on the divine and abysmal ground of all being, on the interrelated web of existence of which we are a part; we celebrate those creative and evolutionary processes that brought forth life and its endless forms most beautiful; we offer up a word of contrition for disrupting the ecology of our home planet and neglecting our unique responsibility to protect the earth and its creatures; we hope for a just and sustainable future and pray for the ingenuity and wisdom, the strength and courage to bring it about.

Amen! And again, from Sagan:

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 that the 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. (7)

Good reminders for us, on this special day on this special–but also insignificant–little planet we call home.