Your life seen from 4 billion miles away
Take a look at the photo below. Do you see the little white dot? Do you know what that is? That little speck is Earth, as seen from the Voyager 1 spacecraft from nearly 4 billion miles away.
Look at tiny pale white spot. That’s where you live, that’s home. Everyone you know, everyone you love, everyone you ever seen or heard of, is there, every living being that there is, lives there. Your family, your friends, your enemies, your colleagues, your loved-ones, they’re all there.
On that small white spot you lived your past, you consume your present, and you expect your future.
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. –Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994
Our planet and our lives, what are they? They are just a tiny stage in the vastness of the cosmos. Imagine those generals and emperors who spilled rivers of blood in their dreams of conquering the world, the small dot. Those were great plans if we look at them from a single person’s point of view, but if we change the perspective and look at the object of all those cruelties and wars from this position in space, we may ask ourselves: “was it worth it?”.
Think about how people living in that little pixel are unable to understand each other, think about how frequent their misunderstandings are. Think about how much love is contained within that small dot…
A great method to gain a different perspective on your life is to take a journey, a journey alone to someplace you’ve never been before. I find looking at this picture at least as effective as that.
Imagine how more than 6 billions of people are able to live complex lives inside the fraction of a dot… When seeing things from this perspective, it’s easy to get closer to understanding what matters and what doesn’t.
Next time you want to get unstuck or simply see a problem or issue in your life differently, take a look at this picture and focus on your problem from that distant point of view. It will help you immensely.
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That picture made me cry… I dont know why.
Maybe because we are so small in this big (huge) universe….
Knowing how much is in that pixel, I just can’t believe all the other pixels are so empty. Are they?
Alex, the other pixels aren’t empty. The image was zoomed in to capture a view of the Earth.
The reason why you see Earth highlighted like that is because it lied right in the center of one of the scattered light rays resulting from taking the image so close to the sun.
“From Voyager’s great distance Earth is a mere point of light, less than the size of a picture element even in the narrow-angle camera. Earth was a crescent only 0.12 pixel in size.”
*Cristina: Altough it may sound strange, it’s a good thing that it managed to make you cry.
Crying is perhaps the easiest and fastest way to release emotional pain and it is also a natural way of releasing toxins that are associated with various emotions: both “good” and “bad”.
The fact that this picture managed to touch a sensitive chord inside of you can only be good.
I really like this post - putting things in proper perspective and don’t take ourselves too personally.
Great job!