During a public lecture at Cornell University in 1994, Carl Sagan presented the image to the audience and shared his reflections on the deeper meaning behind the idea of the Pale Blue Dot:
"We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every 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 in 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 the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. 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 β in all this vastness β there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, 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 and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known".

Masterminded by Carl Sagan, the final photograph of Earth, the 'Pale Blue Dot', taken by Voyager 1, some 3.7 billion miles away from our planet...the very concept is mind blowing...After it nearly didn't happen at all (the photograph), what a wonderful idea and achievement of Sagan's, to convince NASA to turn Voyager's camera around to take this one last photograph of Earth...a truly amazing image.
βYou may not be able to change the world, but at least you can embarrass the guilty.β
β Jessica Mitford, author, journalist & civil rights activist (1917-1996)
What an amazing visionary Carl Sagan was.....scarily accurate
In the next paragraph, Sagan bemoans the fact that the #1 movie in the U.S. at the time of his writing was 'Beavis & Butthead Do America' . I still love Carl Sagan, but he wasn't right about everything. Which reminds me of something that Oppenheimer said that I don't sit well with at all. Another reminder that nobody is always right (except me, according to my wife π). "If we can't disprove Bohm, the we must at least ignore him" . Bunch of quantum physics shit I do not understand , but I have read enough to decide that Bohm's ideas should not be ignored (you asshole)π€£.
"I'm not marrying you!,
You stuck your tongue two inches up my arse and waggled it around."
π²
..someone, somewhere..π€£
Any song lyrics Frank Zappa ever wrote.
From 'Terminator' - 'In 100 years, who's gonna care?' and
from 'Robin Hood:Prince of Thieves' ' 'Nobility is not a birthright, it is defined by one's actions'
Quoted these lines ever since, as they are soooooooooooooooooo true!
βThe duty or beauty of a painting is that there is no reason to do it nor any reason not to.βΒ
β Robert Rauschenberg, 1925 β 2008
In honour of W.B.'s birthday, 28 November, 1757
ππ€£π
Here's Idris Elba reciting it ...
Wow ta x
If you can't change the world, change yourself
And if you can't change yourself, then change your world.
Matt Johnson, The The
... from Twitter photo of someone wearing an out-of-stock tee from Julian Cope's website
Lieutenant Worf:
There is no honor in attacking the weak.
Also: I am NOT a merry man!