The Uncherished Homeland
Ever gazed at the summer night sky, full of scattered moon dust and wondered how they winked at us from the endless vault beyond the moon’s corona. They appear to us as luminescent dots all over the sky. To our utter ignorance, the planet Earth which we claim to be our macrocosmic home, which is so big and beautiful, also appears as a dot in the cosmos. It is just that this one is a blue dot, rather a pale blue dot.
THE BLANK SPACE
13.8 billion years ago the universe was created out of a hot Big Bang and over time, the space itself has expanded and had undergone gravitational forces landing up with the Universe we know today. Our planet Earth is in the third position from the Sun with seven other siblings forming the solar system which is one of the many solar systems in our milky way and for a matter of fact there are tons of milky way in our universe. All the information is scrutinised in attempts to understand the origin and evolution of the galaxy _ a goal toward which astronomers continue to make great strides.
THE PALE BLUE DOT
One such huge success was the picture of the ‘pale blue dot’. Twenty nine years ago, on 14th February 1990, Voyage 1 spacecraft clicked the first ever picture of our solar system, including Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter, Earth and Venus while turning the spaceship towards the Earth. It is important to remember that clicking this “family portrait” was not at all a plan. Unfortunately, Mars had little sunlight, Mercury was very close to the sun and Pluto turned out too dim while the picture was taken , so they could not make it to the photograph. The picture was taken from a distance of more than 4 billion miles from Earth and about 32 degrees from the ecliptic. The Earth looks like a mere point of light due to the huge distance from Earth, where Voyage 1 was clicking the snap but coincidentally, Earth lies in the centre of the scattered light rays resulting from the intense sunlight and the it looks dramatic. It is one of the most famous picture of Earth, although it appears as a ‘pale blue dot’.
THE FORMER BACKDROP
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration(NASA) launched Voyage 1, a 722 kg robotic spacecraft on a mission to go in the outer space and to explore it in 1977. Voyage 1 was the first spaceship that was able to provide comprehensive images of the two largest planets, (Jupiter and Saturn) and their major moons. This space shuttle is still loitering in the universe and it is the first man-made shuttle to leave the solar system and explore beyond. It still receives command and transmits back important data back to the NASA Deep Space Network. When the spacecraft encountered Saturn in 1980, Carl Sagan proposed the idea of the spaceship to take one last picture of the Earth although the picture would not be of much help to science as the planet Earth would appear as a dot in the camera but it would be meaningful as a perspective on our home in the universe.
THE ALTER PANORAMA
The sensation that this picture provides us is both unusual and difficult to put into words. A book named ‘Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space’ was written by Carl Sagan in 1994 , where he says, “Look again at the dot. That’s here. That’s home. On it everyone you love, everyone you know , everyone you heard of, every human being who ever was lived out their lives. Every aggregates of our joy and suffering is , thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every Hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every mother, father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived here—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”
All I want to say
The image of the pale blue dot gives us the perspective of how insignificant is our lives on Earth , when compared to the gigantic s the cosmos. We think we are safe here, in our big blue planet but it is not. The mundane things of life, ideologies like racism, sexism, imperialism , war and even emotional turmoil are just petty things as they are momentary glorification of a fraction of a dot. Everything will collapse into ashes if there is a slight distraction in the orbital path of any planet and it collides Earth. Yet, living in this distinct planet that benefits us with all its wonderful resources, we are misusing them for our trivial interests. It is the only planet known so far to harbour life and there is no other places where our species can migrate in the distant future and think of settling down. So it is for our own good, we should learn to take care of this place and to think in a wider spectrum as it underscores our responsibilities to deal with each other with more of humanity and to preserve our species and our homeland.
It is this planet that we call our ‘home’, which maybe is a mere ‘pale blue dot’ somewhere in the extragalactic nebula but it is our only home which is long waiting to be cherished.
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