Renown American Astronomer Carl Sagan
“It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.” – Carl Sagan
Posted April 8th, 2026 by Doug Draper on Niagara At Large followed by some passionate words about protecting our planet from the late, great astronomer, Carl Sagan
As the one Canadian and three American astronauts on the NASA spaceship head for home this April 8th after becoming the first to completely orbit and set eyes on the dark side of the moon, they took some awesome photos of our planet Earth while on their lunar journey.
Apollo 11 moon mission photo of Earth in 1969
The photos were reminiscent of ones taken on a 1969 Apollo 11 NASA mission that inspired the very first Earth Day that brought more than 100 millions of people around the world together on April 22nd 1970 in a call-out their governments to do everything possible to protect and preserve our life-sustaining environment for present and future generations.
In the wake of those Apollo photos, Carl Sagan, a renown astronomer at the time, wrote some very passionate words to his fellow humans on this planet that I think are just as relevant, if not more so, than they were when he first shared them.
So as this mission to the moon, replete with its amazing photos of our Earth, I want to share Carl Sagan’s words with you.
Here they are, Doug Draper, Niagara At Large –
“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 spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”
To watch a video of Carl Sagan sending out this message, click on the screen imediately below –
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