Sometimes, it behooves us to consider a larger perspective.

Here is one such perspective. On September 5, 1977, NASA launched Voyager 1, a deep space probe designed to study the outer Solar System. This device performed far better than expected. As I write this, the probe is over 13.6 billion miles from Earth, the farthest of any devices ever launched by man…and is still responding to commands.

By 1990, Voyager 1 had completed its primary mission and was heading out of the Solar System. However, it was to get one final and most significant mission. Astronomer Carl Sagan prevailed upon NASA to have the spacecraft take a “family portrait” of the planets in the solar system, including Earth. The pictures were taken on Valentine’s Day, 1990 from a distance of 6 billion miles from home. The one showing Earth is the subject of a book by Sagan. No thinking person can see that picture, read his words, and then logically conclude that this all “just happened” on its own.

We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives.

The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every 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.

Carl Sagan, 1994