Thread by @MarchForScience

A thread to change your life.

This image of Earth was acquired by the Voyager 1 spacecraft on Feb 14th, 1990. From 4 billion miles (6.4 billion kilometers) away.

Voyager took this photo, and continued on, and is now the furthest human-made object from Earth.

Carl Sagan insisted that it was worth NASA’s time to acquire this image, because he knew the impact it would have on our concept of ourselves, and our place in the universe.

In his final book, entitled Pale Blue Dot, centered around the theme of humility, awe, and hope for the future of humans.

In honor of #CarlSaganDay, we share this quote, which you may have heard before.

(Begin quote)

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.

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.

(End quote)

With all we’ve been through the past few years, we have often said ourselves, and heard others say how much we all miss Carl, and how badly we need him now. But here’s the thing:

Carl is here now.

He speaks to us across time and space through funny little squiggly lines he made on a piece of tree, through 1’s and 0’s and pixels in our pocket computers. We can hear his cello-resonant planetarium voice any time we want.

But more than that?

We are his living legacy. Anyone who teaches science is his voice. Anyone who writes science is his hands. Anyone who fights for justice is his heart.

We are a light that never went out, won’t go out.

Happy birthday, Carl

🎂✨