We can never see...

Look at that picture. My first thought: We are very tiny, because that blue beach ball? That's everything we've ever created. Every influential leader, every war, everything. Just sort of...there.

Now let's zoom out a bit:
See the teeny speck? Us. Everything. Humanity and everything that goes with it. Mr. Carl Sagan said it better than pretty much anyone:

We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every 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 in 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 the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. 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. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, 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 and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

Only...it's not. That's not everything. Because something took that picture. There were astronauts and cameras and film and the Lunar module and the work of thousands and thousands of people on the Moon. Thousands of people effected Voyager 1. Millenia of human knowledge went up with that little craft. Take a picture of the earth from millions of miles away, billions of miles away, however far, and there's still something looking back at us taking that picture.

We can never see beyond what we've accomplished. We managed to send a camera that far away from home, but as far as it gets is as far as we can see.


For bonus fun, think about the fact that the light from the Earth in that second picture probably took years to get to that lens, which means that that's not a picture of the Earth at the moment that picture was taken. It's a picture of the Earth at some point in the past.