Cosmicism asserts that humanity is doomed to death and destruction through the workings of vastly more powerful supernatural forces way beyond our understanding. Lovecraft and, later, August Derleth, and features a cosmology in which humanity is depicted as inconsequential within a greater existence that is unknowable and frightening. This Mythos is expounded in fantasy/horror works of H.P. The title text evokes Cosmicism, a philosophy developed and exemplified by the fictional Cthulhu Mythos. The first two sentences of the title text are also a quotation from Sagan's paean to the Pale Blue Dot picture, but then the text veers humorously into non-scientific mysticism that starkly contrasts with the attitude and intent of the original work. This is a reference to the missions where the lens cap was not removed and the resulting photos were black. This pokes fun at the fact that the Pale Blue Dot picture has very little to no visual attractiveness, apart from the intellectual interest relying on the viewer's knowledge that the central speck is actually our home planet, Earth, seen from a very great distance.Īnother Heckler says that the photo is a "lens cap". Then, when Cueball cries out in exasperation that it doesn't matter, one heckler takes it the wrong way and points out that he just said that the picture doesn't matter. The complete passage can be found in Wikiquote, and you can hear Carl Sagan himself reciting it in this YouTube video.Ĭueball quotes from a condensed version of this passage until he is interrupted by several hecklers who begin an argument over which speck in the picture is actually the Earth. In the book, Sagan waxed eloquent about the picture in a widely quoted passage.
In 1994 Sagan wrote the book " Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space" inspired by this picture. The picture was taken at the request of Carl Sagan, a well known space scientist at that time. It was part of the Family Portrait, a series of images of the entire Solar System from beyond it. The Pale Blue Dot is a picture of the Earth taken in the year 1990 by the Voyager 1 space probe at a distance about 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles).
Earth is the "pale blue dot" halfway up the rightmost color band.
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