I've always been an outer space junkie...not of the Star Trek or sci-fi bent... but more a general fascination with planets, stars and the like. I came across this and the enormity of just how small our planet is. This is a picture taken by Voyager 1 in 1990 as it sailed away from Earth, more than 4 billion miles in the distance. It captured the rays of the sun at very close range. In one of those sun rays, the camera caught an image of the Earth...as a tiny speck (shown with the arrow).
On October 13, 1994, the famous astronomer Carl Sagan commented on these photos during one of his lectures:
"We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every 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. "
There are times when all the "small stuff" of life seems to pile up and take on a life of its own. Relationships, careers and even which tile to pick for a kitchen floor can all seem like life-altering
decisions. But, when we take a moment to comprehend just how small our world is in the scope of the universe...and just how tiny we are in the scope of the Earth...then those everyday things don't seem so big after all.
