This morning I was up at sunrise to fly my drone above my house at an altitude of 400 feet in order to take pictures of Chapoquoit beach. I was maneuvering the drone to get different angles and shooting multiple pictures of West Falmouth Harbor and the beach beyond. Several minutes into the session I had an idea to turn the drone around and see what it looked like behind me.
In 1990, when the Voyager 1 space probe was completing a nearly 13-year mission of traveling across our solar system, Carl Sagan requested that the spacecraft be turned around to take a picture looking back at Earth. The resulting image is a picture of our planet from 3.7 billion miles away. The image is called “Pale Blue Dot” because Earth appears as a tiny point inside of an orange-brown streak of light. Sagan, who was not only a scientist, but also a wonderful writer, described the image of Earth as a “mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”
Sagan also wrote these words about the photograph: “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.”
I thought about Carl Sagan and his eloquent words when I opened the above image of this morning's sunrise on my computer screen . Why, I wonder, are we humans so quick to swallow the lies of charlatans and con men and so unlikely to embrace the wisdom of our sages?
What will happen to us if we can’t find the courage to step out of our rage and reflect on who we are and how much we have to lose if we don’t follow Sagan’s advice to deal more kindly with one another and preserve and cherish the only planet on which we can ever live?
If you find yourself in a fearful, angry mob rushing forward to make the world conform to a hate-filled ideology, I wish you would consider briefly turning around and looking backward at the history of destruction and despair wrought by other angry mobs.
Monte