Pangea Day: Pale Blue Dot - words by Carl Sagan

Pangea Day: Pale Blue Dot

Although I wasn't able to catch Pangea Day live, there are a number of short videos posted on the site, and the one I've chosen is this one, as described here...

In 1990, Carl Sagan persuaded NASA to use the Voyager 1 spacecraft to take a photograph of the planet Earth from a distance of 4 billion miles. The result was simply arresting: a portrait of our home as a tiny, fragile speck of blue adrift in an unimaginably vast sea of space. In a commencement address for the public release of the photograph, astronomer Sagan offered these profound words:

"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."

As has been mentioned elsewhere, although we as humans are tiny in comparison with the daunting vastness of space and the Universe in general, it is nevertheless entirely remarkable that an assemblage of molecules such as ourselves and brains have evolved to the extent that we are actually able to contemplate the nature of our Universe, and our place within it.

And on a related note, here's a link to another short video on 'human universals', which is also part of the Pangea Day experience - here's the introduction from the site...

Anthropologist Donald Brown is the leading authority on "human universals" - the hundreds of attributes that every human has in common

"Humans are and must be sensitive to differences. But too much focus on difference lurks behind human conflict. We should find hope in realizing how rich and numerous our commonalities are."

To view more videos from other speakers around the world and participating in the same event, just click here.

image from here