Carl Sagan
Today is one of my favorite human's birthday: Carl Sagan. I read his words like I would those of a mystic, finding constant inspiration for my classes and my days. For instance, on February 14th, 1990, Carl persuaded NASA engineers to turn Voyager 1 around and take a picture of Planet Earth from the edge of the universe (4 billion miles away). The picture is now known as "The Pale Blue Dot." When you see it, it takes a while to find the Earth- it is just a speck, a dot, a punctuation mark on the spectrum of light. Carl wrote:
"From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. 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."
Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
sigh!
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