Aw, what a cute … thing!

It’s the baby version of Carl Sagan’s famous, beautiful meditation on the Pale Blue Dot. In his piece, Sagan explores the the implications of this photo of our home, our planet, taken in 1990 from the edge of our solar system by the Voyager 1 spacecraft. Not even the edge — Voyager was still 20 years from the real edge separating our little oasis from true interstellar space. Despite being taken from not very far away at all on a cosmic scale, our entire world shows up as a dot. Just a dot. Sitting in a ray of light from the nearby, nearly overwhelming Sun. Sagan says it better than I ever could. 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. Listen to it. Then listen again. It’s humbling, to look at that dot and think that’s (almost) all we have ever known. No human has travelled farther than the immediate neighborhood of that dot. Except for a handful of astronauts and robot travelers, everything in the human experience that has been and will be, perhaps for a very long time, occupies that pale blue dot. We saw Critter on the sonogram today. Just a tiny lump, hardly identifiable as anything other than a lump except for the pulsing, eager heartbeat, surrounded by the vastness of the future....