Loading...Carl Sagan is one of the most famous scientists, astronomers, astrophysicists, and science popularizers of all time, ensuring his place in history with his many great works including Cosmos, a famous science TV show, and his book Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space. Before there was Neil DeGrasse Tyson to tell us how amazing science is, there was Carl Sagan, a man so learned, smart, and eloquent in his explanation of his knowledge as to inspire generations of kids interested in science for years to come. Just because I love it so much, below is the most famous quote from his book on the “pale blue dot”, his description of the picture of the Earth from Saturn (below).
The video above is part of Reid Gower’s series of videos, titled THE SAGAN SERIES, in which Reid takes recordings of Carl Sagan and makes them into stunning videos full of incredible footage. The video above features Carl Sagan talking about humanity’s future in space and space travel, and somehow, it makes Sagan’s words even more inspiring and insightful. Altogether, the video does a wonderful job of adding visuals to Carl Sagan’s words, and in general is just a very interesting and wonderfully thought-provoking video.
“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 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. 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.
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.”