Space, Time and a Pale Blue Dot

Husband and I went for a date tonight, and a Journey Through the Cosmos with Professor Brian Cox and the Queensland Symphony Orchestra.
The fabulous talk given by Cox was supplemented by amazing live music inspired by our solar system and our exploration of it.
Yet one moment took my breath away… Prof Cox flicked the wide screen image behind the orchestra to this soft, grainy image taken in 1990.

World famous scientist and NASA advisor, Carl Sagan, suggested Voyager 1 turn its cameras back to Earth for one last look at home before venturing into the outer solar system. From 6 billon kilometres away, Voyager saw Earth as a tiny pale blue dot, illuminated by a beam of sunlight. These are the words he wrote in response to the image, and read to us tonight by Professor Cox;

“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.”

I don’t know about you, but it makes me feel infinitely tiny, yet exponentially awesome!
So hug the organism beside you and allow yourself a moment to wonder at the scale of it all, the ridiculous events of chance that led us to this time and place, and the beauty of not knowing.

Peace, fellow human. Peace…

Source: http://www.planetary.org/explore/space-topics/earth/pale-blue-dot.html