Analyzing The Pale Blue Dot

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DateAnalyzing ‘The Pale Blue Dot’
Carl Sagan is a world renowned theoretical astrophysicist and promoter of science. Inspired by a picture of the Earth taken by the Voyager 1 space probe in the year 1990, Sagan wrote a speech entitled the Pale Blue Dot as a reaction to the light distortion in the camera. Despite the fact that the planet is the only world understood to harbor advanced civilized life, Sagan reminds the audience how insignificant humanity’s greatest ambitions to destroy and conquer one another are when observed as a mote of dust in the ever expanding galaxy of stars. These ambitions are ironic for humans have often perceived themselves as superstars and supreme leaders when in fact the Earth itself is much smaller than the vast majority of real stars in the universe; particularly the Sun.
Most people, however, have disregarded the rest of the universe as they only understand the Earth. Sagan emphasizes this point with anaphora in which he describes the planet: “That’s here. That’s home. That’s us”. This technique is a common occurrence throughout the speech to deepen the impact of the thesis when defining humanity’s natural savagery (e.g., “how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds”). Although the Earth is where the people make their first and last stand, Sagan metaphorically ties the planet to nothing more than a lonely speck of pale light in a sea of darkness. Each of the various metaphors is simply proof of concept that humanity is far too self-absorbed and ambitious to truly understand just how unimportant and insignificant its civilization is when compared to what is beyond the world.

Work Cited
Sagan, Carl. Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space. Random House, 1997.