Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

While almost everyone is taught that the Earth is a sphere with all of us somehow glued to it by gravity, the reality of our circumstance did not really begin to sink in until the famous frame-filling Apollo photograph of the whole Earth—the one taken by the Apollo 17 astronauts on the last journey of humans to the Moon

Life is a comparative rarity. You can survey dozens of worlds and find that on only one of them does life arise and evolve and persist

Every one of these worlds is lovely and instructive. But, so far as we know, they are also, every one of them, desolate and barren. Out there, there are no "better places." So far, at least.

Today we call them planets, the Greek word for wanderers. It was, I imagine, a peculiarity our ancestors could relate to.

Moby Dick, spoke for wanderers in all epochs and meridians: "I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas . . ."

The open road still softly calls, like a nearly forgotten song of childhood. We invest far-off places with a certain romance.

But tell me, who are they, these wanderers . . .?

—RAINER MARIA RILKE, "THE FIFTH ELEGY" (1923)

Today we call them planets, the Greek word for wanderers.

Long before Columbus, Indonesian argonauts in outrigger canoes explored the western Pacific; people from Borneo settled Madagascar; Egyptians and Libyans circumnavigated Africa; and a great fleet of ocean going junks from Ming Dynasty China crisscrossed the Indian Ocean, established a base in Zanzibar, rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and entered the Atlantic Ocean

Herman Melville, in Moby Dick, spoke for wanderers in all epochs and meridians: “I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas…”