The Pale Blue Dot

For the past two years, I’ve really enjoyed the Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar. Each day in December leading up to Christmas a new image from deep space is posted. The photos are breathtaking and at the same time humbling. I encourage each of you to set aside some time during this hectic season to just sit and bask in the glory of the photos. Put on Christmas music, sit in a comfortable chair, and be amazed at the vastness and majestic beauty of God's universe.

As I’ve enjoyed these awe-inspiring photos of worlds beyond all human imagination and experience, I’ve often felt like exclaiming in gratitude to God as King David did many centuries ago,

“When I look at the night sky and see the work of your hands—the moon and the stars you set in place—what are mere mortals that you should think about them, human beings that you should care for them?" (Psalm 8, verses 3 and 4)

This Christmas season I am grateful that God cared enough about us to send His son Jesus.

On the left is a photograph taken by Voyager I in 1990. If you look closely in the upper center of this photograph you will find a pale blue dot—little more than a tiny speck in the vastness of space. If you can't find the pale blue dot on this photo, try looking at the one at THIS LINK. That speck is our planet, Earth, seen from 4 billion miles away. As the spacecraft left our planetary neighborhood for the fringes of the solar system, engineers turned it around for one last look at its home planet. Caught in the center of scattered light rays (a result of taking the picture so close to the Sun), Earth appears as a tiny point of light only a little more than a tenth of a pixel in size. I want to wish you a Merry Christmas by sharing famed astronomer Carl Sagan’s comments about this pale blue dot on which Jesus was born, lived out his life, died, and rose again.

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 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. 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.

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.

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.

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