This is the greatest science lesson I know.
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On 14 February 1990, the spacecraft known as Voyager 1 was flying through space around 4 billion miles (6.4 billion kilometers) away from the planet Earth. Just before venturing out into the vast darkness beyond our solar system, it turned itself around to take one last snapshot of our home planet.
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The picture you're about to see is, in my opinion, the most important photo ever taken. Caught in the center of scattered lens flares, the Earth appears as a tiny, blue pinpoint of light, only a little over one tenth of a pixel in size.
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I ask that you look long and hard at this picture and then carefully read the words of the great astrophysicist Carl Sagan written below it.
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This is why I am who I am and why I do what I do. I am confident that, whoever you are and whatever our differences, this image and the lesson it delivers will make our paths a little more similar.
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Thank you for allowing me to share this with you. I sincerely wish you all the best.
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-Forrest
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.
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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.
— Carl Sagan
"Pale Blue Dot", 1994