Pale Blue Dot

We live on a pale blue dot.

A small pale blue dot.

A very small pale blue dot.

This is obvious.

But what many say next isn’t obvious to me.

“The smallness of our pale blue dot makes us insignificant. We’re just a tiny speck in the cosmos. Why bother?”

Why bother?

I take the opposite view of this.

The vastness of space is not a sign for despair but rather hope.

Excitement.

Wonder.

There are planets that rain diamonds, supernovas that stretch across galaxies, black holes that can even light can’t outrun, radiation that was here billions of years before life on Earth could ever even conceive of its existence.

“The Cosmos extends, for all practical purposes, forever…

They [spacefaring humans] will gaze up and strain to find the blue dot in their skies. They will love it no less for its obscurity and fragility.

They will marvel at how vulnerable the repository of all our potential once was, how perilous our infancy, how humble our beginnings, how many rivers we had to cross before we found our way.”

-Carl Sagan (Pale Blue Dot, 1994)