"My God, it's full of stars!"

PART I
Once upon a time a little boy stared up into the night sky. So many stars and planets were out there. Human beings were in a small metal tube constantly falling towards the Earth, yet always missing. The little boy was amazed that around every star he could see there could be a planet like the one beneath his feet. The little boy got books about stars, constellations, the planets, and what was simply out there. The little boy learned that stars had names and that groups of stars formed pictures. The planets were named after Roman gods and that required learning about history so ancient he couldn't really phathom how long ago it was.

The boy got a shiny telescope as a gift one time and wanted to see those faraway objects better. He could see the canals of Mars and the rings of Saturn. The Moon was so close he could make out mountain ranges easily though the contraption of glass and plastic.

Sadly the lights of man encroached upon the night sky. A security light here, a series of streetlamps there, divisions of new houses with all their light slowly sprung up in the former farmland. The lights of man clouded the night sky with a haze and the starlight grew dim. As he could no longer see the stars the boy becoming a man forgot much of what he had learned. His knowledge dimming along with the starlight. The wonder of looking up was almost painful to remember what had been.

Yet time passes on for mortal men. They boy became a man. The man could travel all over the world. He had visited the place that launched other men into space. He had visited places that were influenced by the ancient men who named the stars and worlds. He could go to a place far away from the lights that dimmed the sky.

The pier extended into the northern lake. The house light turned off and the new moon set earlier. The trees didn't extend over the lake and the night sky was clear. He looked up and saw those childhood stars again. No, he saw so many stars his mind couldn't fathom it. All those stars plus so many more. The amazing discovery of a shooting star would occasionally streak across the sky. Part of the sky had a milky diffuse light to it. So many stars so far away created that trick.

Humans like to be better than the world. We shape the world by our will. That is good for many things, yet such actions give us a false sense of superiority. We're important in our own minds. I know many people that need to go to the pier on the northern lake and look up for a change instead of looking forward or back. If they looked up and saw all that was out there, would they feel humbled and small? Perhaps we need to feel small sometimes to realize that so many things we give importance don't really matter. Perhaps we need to realize that of all the things we have here are nothing compared to all the things out there.

PART II


Famed astronomer Carl Sagan suggested that Voyager 1 should take one last look at its home planet before leaving the solar system. NASA engineers didn't see the point originally as they figured the spacecraft wouldn't see anything. They didn't realize that was the point. On February 14, 1990 the spacecraft Voyager 1 was about 4 billion miles away when it took the picture of our world. The resulting picture showed the Earth as only 0.12 pixel in size.

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.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. 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 with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
-Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994