This is home.
Have you realized how terrifyingly tiny the Earth is? It’s one of those things that you know, you’ve learned about, but still takes quite some time to hit you. In other words, you know, but you don’t really know.
I present to you our home, our self-portrait, our Pale Blue Dot:
© NASA/JPL-Caltech
This photo shows the Earth (right of the photo; the last sunbeam) from a distance of about 6 billion kilometers by the Voyager 1 space probe in 1990.
Astronauts often say that they wish everyone could see the world the way they see it. It’s just this beautiful blue marble and we’re all in it - just in one space, one habitat, one Pale Blue Dot. You would think how easy unity could be if we were all actually in this together.
Last Friday was the International Day of Peacekeepers - a day seemingly contradictory for the world’s current events. You would think if everyone realized that this is the only place we can be, this planet Earth in the outskirts of the Milky Way galaxy, a place seemingly insignificant in size but mighty in content, that the world really could be a better place…
We are technically always home. People talk about one day colonizing mars and finding extra terrestrial creatures even though space agencies and scientists have deemed other planets uninhabitable and have not yet found proof of existing life on any other place in our galaxy. My point is, we are all part of that one Pale Blue Dot, that is our home.
You are here, and so are other people.
As of now, we are the only planet that we know of that has an existing human race. So why not care for the people in it? Why not treat people with kindness and respect? Why do we constantly try to bring each other down, instead of lifting each other up? We significantly make up that dot - it’s just us in there, in the vast emptiness of space with other outlandish, uninhabitable planets.
“We can all be peacekeepers.”
I think we can all be peacekeepers - It shouldn’t necessarily a specific job. In my opinion, it is literally the art of making peace with anyone, including ourselves, simply put. So why can’t everyday be peacekeeping day?
We are Earth.
We cannot and should not be able to afford violence in this space - Earth is all we got, let’s protect and respect it, and that means the people in it too.
© NASA/JPL-Caltech
“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.”
-Carl Sagan
