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February 12, 2010

Pale Blue Dot Valentine


I love this photo. It's our Earth as seen from Voyager I back in 1990 on Valentine's Day. Here's the whole story on NPR. It is a useful perspective to have.

It's the photo Carl Sagan was referring to when he wrote this wonderful paragraph:

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.