That's home

Why it stays with me

Sagan wrote this about the photograph Voyager 1 took of Earth in 1990, from about six billion kilometres away. Earth appears as a speck smaller than a pixel.

What makes the passage powerful is how ordinary its words are. There’s no technical language, just the plain fact that everyone who has ever lived, lived on that dot.

I come back to it when something feels very important. It doesn’t make problems disappear, but it puts them in proportion, and it’s hard to read it without wanting to be a little kinder.