After 13 years of flying to the edge of our solar system, the American Voyager 1 space probe, reached the almost incomprehensible distance of 6.4 billion kilometres (nearly 4 billion miles) from Earth in 1990 and was turned around to take a picture of our home planet. Earth is no more than a pale blue dot, hardly to be seen against the cosmic background.
The insignificance of our planet in the truly fascinating happenings of the universe becomes more clear, when trying to comprehend, that the Milky Way, which can be seen on a clear night, is in fact what a spiral galaxy looks like from the inside! It may contain up to 400 billion stars – one of them, is our sun.
And then, on one of the sun's planets, there are humans. When contemplating the irrelevance of every single being on earth against the immense numbers that the universe provides, our mind protests, that this can not be so. But with all the evidence we have from hundreds of years of exploring the night sky, we have to come to the conclusion, that it is.
Some people feel small because the universe is so big. But in our each and every life, there is no time to mourn our humble existence, nor to believe that of all possible life forms in the universe, just we are the selected species. Let us accept the fact, that we are a very small part of the universe and concentrate on our life and the lives of people we love and care for, making our home planet a more peaceful place to live.
After all, we are forced to get along together. There is no way of escaping our home planet and, as yet, there is nowhere else to reach besides our pale blue dot.
Philipp
[email protected]
Passau, Germany