pale blue dot

"To my mind, 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 and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known"

- Carl Sagan.

This photo was taken in 1990 by the Voyager craft, when it turned around, upon reaching the end of its journey through the solar system, and captured this image of the Earth hanging in a sunbeam. It's one of the most beautiful, affecting images I think I've ever seen. In terms of reminding us how we should appreciate the Earth, and each other.

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“Consider again 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 on the pale blue dot.