Perspective from Voyager I

As infuriating as our species can be, with our killing and our bickering and our superstitions and our willful ignorance, our species also created the device that took this photograph. On February 14, 1990, the Voyager I space probe took its last photograph ever (though it is still sending back data to this day) looking back toward Earth as it passed beyond the outermost planetary orbits of our Solar System. From a distance of nearly 4 billion miles, that tiny blue dot in the middle of that sunbeam is Earth. So whatever you may have been doing on February 14, 1990, you were doing it on that little speck.

It's all a question of perspective. From one perspective, our killing and our bickering and our superstitions and our willful ignorance matter a great deal. From another perspective, they're imperceptible scratchings on a barely-visible dot.

On the other hand, seeing this tiny blue dot also reminds me that this planet is all the home we've got. We can send a thing out 4 billion miles and there's still nothing else anywhere around that would do for us. We're on a tiny bit of flotsam in an unimaginably vast ocean of space, so we'd best not botch things up too badly because there's nowhere else within our reach for us to go.