Lost in Space

I have been soaking in my hot tub under the early morning stars for the last few days. As I peer up at the firmament, I keep thinking about how small Earth is in the great wash of stars in which we reside. We humans might be a pretty big deal here on our tilted blue planet, but even our planet seems insignificant in the bigger scheme of things. With this in mind, Carl Sagan, the late astronomer and commentator, asked NASA engineers to train Voyager 1 spacecraft’s camera back on our planet one last time and capture an image of Earth from the edge of the solar system. On February 14, 1990, just beyond Neptune, at a point some 3.7 billion miles from the Sun and 13 years after launch, the craft took a photograph of Earth that has become known as 'The Pale Blue Dot.'

I have written about The Pale Blue Dot previously, but as I stare up at the stars more recently and consider all the crazy things we humans do to one another here on our little blue planet, I feel rather lonely. Gaza, political discord, Ukraine, and on into our own collective infinity of absurdities: What can I do to fix them? I, too, am little more than a pale blue dot.

Pale Blue Dot

—Mitchell Hegman