About
Pale blue dot is the title of a book by Carl Sagan about the past and future of mankind. The title was inspired by a Voyager photograph taken on Valentines day 1990. It showed the Earth from about 4 billion miles away, as a tiny speck of blue in a vast ocean of black interstellar space.
If you try to picture yourself in the universe, between the very big and the very small you would have to place yourself nearer the smaller things. See it as an out of body exercise, try to visualise yourself in the three dimensional environment. The universe is fucking big, so big we have great difficulty in imagining the space it encompasses, but if you really try I’m sure you will do it. If you take into account the vast amounts of time and space you have just visualised, what portion of that visualisation is you and your life ? It’s a fucking small amount I can tell you. Once you have come to terms with the fact that you are so small and have such a brief time to make your life enjoyable, the rest is a piece of piss. Sit back in your chair, take a fucking big slug of whatever it is you drink, take a big deep breath and thank the star that spawned you that you have the good fortune to be alive on this amazing world. Bollocks to the day-today worries and stresses, bollocks to all the people who give you shit. Fuck bills and deadlines and responsibility and all the other crap that punctuates your everyday life. They are all irrelevancies, to be burned away by the sheer joy of living.
Thanks should go to Carl Sagan and Voyager for allowing me to find my place in the universe.
I have been blogging since 2002, for the complete archive go here.