Happy Valentine's Day!

I have a confession to make. For years, I've been madly in love with Carl Sagan. He's one of my heroes. He was a brilliant scientist who brought knowledge of astronomy and space to millions on his show Cosmos. They still show reruns of it here on PBS. He had a way of explaining things so you really understood it and not only understood it, but realized how important everything is, how interrelated the universe is, and how it affects all of us. NPR just did a wonderful piece called "An Alien View of Earth." The image above is a a photo that was taken of earth by the Voyager 1 spacecraft from 4 billion miles away on Valentine's Day, 1990, when the spacecraft turned its cameras to Earth. What you see is an illuminated speck, which really shows our relationship to the entire universe. The entire article is wonderful; but what really stands out for me is this quote from Carl Sagan.

In his book Pale Blue Dot, he described the photo taken by Voyager 1 by saying:

Look again at that dot. 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.

Happy Valentine's Day to all of my friends and family from the home that we all share and love, our beautiful planet. May we all learn to appreciate, respect, and become guardians of this blue dot we call home.