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Pale Blue Dot Essay Examples

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I would like to start out by reading you something that was written the year I graduated high school by the late Doctor Carl Sagan. This is a passage from his book, Pale Blue Dot. It was inspired by a series of photographs he had requested NASA take using the Voyager 1 spacecraft. It was the first ever portrait of our solar system capturing Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter, Venus and Earth. The images were the last photos take by Voyager. “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. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood

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