Hit Pause, Zoom Out, and Savor Where You Are: The Pale Blue Dot Revisited

Take a moment to step back, breathe deeply, and savor these words from Carl Sagan.

Earthrise—the rising Earth greeted the Apollo 8 astronauts on December 24, 1968, as they came from behind the Moon after the fourth nearside orbit. Photo by NASA on Unsplash

One of my favorite authors and sources of inspiration, whom I often turn to in times of distress, is Carl Sagan. No other author comes close to having the ability to arrest my attention and see the broader picture of our world and what is at stake if we fail to keep our heads on straight. He not only had a way with words but also a way of transporting his readers to consider things from a bird's-eye view or perhaps from someone floating around the earth in space, merely staring down at the earth with nothing to do but peacefully contemplate our existence.

Take a moment today to step back from all the noise and savor these words from his 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.”

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-JSB