It's a pale blue dot kind of day

I was thinking again this morning about the beauty of a neuron. And that reminded me of Carl Sagan's "pale blue dot" quote, which I've shared before.

Sagan was commenting about a photograph sent back from the Voyager I spacecraft in which the earth appears as a tiny blue dot in the middle of the frame. From 3.7 billion miles away, we're but a pixel.

Here's what he had to say:

... 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.

We live in an infinite universe, yet only the tiniest of fractions of it is accessible to us. And that's true not only of us as a species, but of each of us as individuals. The vast majority of us will travel over only a few score square miles of the earth's surface. We'll remain oblivious to what happens in the next city over. The hopes and sufferings of our neighbor will be unknown to us. We may share a bed with someone for 30 years and come to interact more with the person who we imagine them to be than the soul that lies within them.

The pale blue dot, like a single neuron, is a reminder that even the tiniest portion of the universe is consequential.

Still, a neuron cannot perform its function in isolation. None of us can reach our potential on our own.

Don't miss the opportunity to expand your world today.