The famed astrophysicist Carl Sagan and former President Jimmy Carter shared a fundamental understanding about the fragility of our planet and the futility of our wars in a “vast and awesome universe.”
Sagan was instrumental in the launch of the Voyager 1 probe, which surveyed Jupiter and Saturn before heading into interstellar space. Sagan visited the White House in 1977, discussing astronomy, extraterrestrial life, and black holes with President Jimmy Carter.
Afterward Carter wrote a note thanking the professor for taking time out of “his busy schedule.” What gracious words from a humble and modest president. And Carter later added a message to be carried by the space probe.
Sagan was of Jewish ancestry in a family that immigrated from Ukraine. He was born in 1934 in Brooklyn, New York, just five years before World War II began. Had Sagan’s family remained in Ukraine, they would have been murdered in the Holocaust. There is a message here for the incoming administration so keen on deportations and limiting immigration.
The astrophysicist was outspoken against the proliferation of nuclear weapons. In 1983 he introduced the idea of nuclear winter, the scenario in which a long ice age would ensue from the mushroom clouds created by the American and Soviet weapons of mass destruction. The fact that Russia threatened the use of such weapons against Ukraine, or tried to weaponize the Zaporizhia nuclear facility, would cause Sagan equal alarm if he were alive today.
Sagan was instrumental in the climate movement in the 1980s, raising concerns of global warming in Congress. In 2025, the earth’s existence might be jeopardized if incoming President Trump withdraws again from the Paris climate accords. It will be a far cry from Carter, the climate-friendly president who installed solar panels on the White House.
It was at Sagan’s suggestion that Voyager 1 turned around for one last look at its home planet, on February 14, 1990, timed for a cosmic Valentine’s Day. At that point it was 3.7 billion miles away, and was about to leave our solar system for interstellar space.
No human object has travelled so far, and it still transmits data back to Earth. It carries a golden record with messages from our planet, including one from Carter. While the former President has recently passed, his voice carries on in the universe:
“This is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts, and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination, and our good will in a vast and awesome universe.”
Four years after Voyager 1 captured the famous “Pale Blue Dot,” Sagan wrote a book with the same title, best known for its haunting prologue. His words are just as powerful in 2024, 30 years later, applied to Ukraine in its third year of war, the Republic of Georgia threatened by Russia, the Gaza Strip enduring another brutal winter, Lebanon recovering from war, and the uncertain futures of Syria and Sudan.
As 2025 begins, rereading Sagan’s prologue gives hope to those dispossessed by conflicts in the world. Pale Blue Dot opens with, “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.”
As we read, look again at Gaza and Georgia; Syria and Ukraine; Lebanon, Sudan, and Yemen. On it everyone they love, everyone they know, everyone they ever heard of, lived out their lives.
Sagan continues, “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.”
“Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot,” he writes.
“There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”
Those remain strong words of hope that 2025 may be a better year on this “Pale Blue Dot.”
Ibrahim Al-Marashi is an associate professor of history at Cal State San Marcos and a visiting scholar at University of San Diego and San Diego State University.
