That Pale Blue Dot

Twenty years ago today, this iconic and wonderful photograph was taken from the Voyager 1. Late astronomer Carl Sagan lobbied for a photo from the outskirts of the solar system, just as the Voyager was about to leave the solar system and move onto explorations within the greater Milky Way.

Sagan himself captured the beauty of the photo best:

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.

As I glance outside and see the piles of grayish snow framing Philadelphia, a city located in the Northeast yet not accustomed to handling such an assault from the sky, I can't help but wonder... That pale blue dot seems so fragile within the greater confines (or lack thereof) of the universe. Meanwhile, we humans tend to be intoxicated by our self-imposed importance. In our hubris, we cause so much damage to the planet we call home. We exert a tremendous amount of influence over this place. But we need to yield our power differently in order to maintain those swirling white clouds and blue oceans evocative of another famous journey in space.