Of the picture, astronomer Carl Sagan said the following:
Looking at a picture like that can be humbling. I think most of the time it makes us think that we are "unimportant" or mostly "meaningless" in comparison to the vastness of the universe.Carl Sagan wrote: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.
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.
Many people look at it and say, why does what happens on Earth matter? What is important about the events on this relatively minuscule pebble?
What do you think? Why does it matter?
I think it matters to us. 'Importance' is relative and subjective. It does not matter much to me or to us what is going on in some other planet millions of light years away. But consider what happens to ourselves, our friends, our families, our fellow humans, the future of our kind, and even the creatures on this planet; that matters to us. That's what we live and work for. Some may think some god or such gave these concerns and values to us through his own concerns and values; I think it was just evolution. But it does not matter much what gave it to us; either way, we have these concerns, and those concerns determine what matters to us.
Whatever the reason, I love being alive, I love myself, I love my friends, I love humanity, and I love loving these things. That's what matters to me. And I think most people feel the same.