Räume öffnen - nach Gott fragen

This is the "homework" I gave the audience of around 350 people at the end of the event

Genesis of the Pale Blue Dot Picture

The Pale Blue Dot photo was taken by the Voyager I probe at the request of Carl Sagan who convinced NASA that the photo was worth the cost even if it had no scientific value. The picture, he said, would show us “our place in the universe“. Many people opposed attempting to take the picture because of technical reasons such as: pointing back at the Sun may damage the imager in the interplanetary probe, but thanks to the tenacity of Carl and his supporters, such as NASA Administrator Richard Truly, Voyager I was adjusted in to attempt to take the picture for Carl and for posterity.

On February 14, 1990, while on its way out of the Solar System, Voyager I turned around to take a photo of Earth. It took this picture from 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles) away. You can kinda see Earth there on the right side in that orangish verticalish band. In there is that slightly lighter speck – that tiny pale blue dot, or as Carl put it “a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam“. This is one of the most powerful photos ever taken.

Transcript of the ‘Pale Blue Dot’ Speech

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider again 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 Saga’s famous Pale Blue Dot speech given at Cornell University in 1994