A tiny dot is our home, it’s us

Elide Siviero

On the Internet I saw the Pale Blue Dot, a photograph of planet Earth taken on 14 February 1990 by the Voyager 1 spacecraft from a distance of more than six billion kilometres. Following an insistent request from the American scientist Carl Sagan, a tiny dot appears in one of these images: the Earth, just ‘a pale blue dot’ in the grainy photo, almost lost in the glow of the Sun. I was struck by Carl Sagan’s words: “This is it. This is our home. This is us.

On it have lived all those you love, all those you know, all those you have heard of, all the human beings who have ever existed, all the sum of our joys and our sufferings... all the heroes and all the cowards, all the creators and destroyers of civilisations, all the kings and all the peasants, (.... ), all the fathers and mothers, all the hopeful children, the inventors and explorers, all the moral teachers, all the corrupt politicians, all the ‘superstars’, all the ‘supreme guides’, all the saints and sinners in the history of our species have lived here, on a speck of dust suspended in a ray of sunlight. (continue)

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