Category Archives: Pale Blue Dot

It’s the Only Home You Have

So, Help Take Care of It

Earth as seen by Voyager 2 at a distance of 6.1 billion kilometers, outside the orbit of Pluto. Courtesy NASA.

See how fragile it is?  How small?  How does that make you feel?  What thoughts does it engender in your mind about the preciousness of this world? Think you might want to do your bit to help preserve it as a safe place for everyone to live?  Celebrate Earth Day, 2011 by helping your home planet in some way.

As the  late Carl Sagan said in his book Pale Blue 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.

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.

(For the rest of this highly inspiring quote, go here.)  We can make a difference, and it’s not all that hard. Keeping our planet healthy knows NO political agenda, no race, creed, gender issues, and is completely in harmony with the cosmos.  So, help do it.