Opinion Columnists | Bob Massaro: Let's not miss the opportunity to safeguard our shared future

As we move into 2025, I find myself reflecting on the past. Carl Sagan and the Voyager 1 team redirected the spacecraft back toward Earth for one final photograph before shutting off the camera (https://tinyurl.com/ynz5bcrb). This iconic photo was taken on Feb. 14, 1990, when Voyager 1 was approximately 3.7 billion miles away from our planet. As it continued its journey deeper into the solar system, there was little of interest left to photograph in its surroundings, eventually leading it toward interstellar space, so the camera was not needed. Now, it is 15.4 billion miles away and moving at over 38,000 mph. This image, known as "The Pale Blue Dot," inspired Carl Sagan to write the following:

"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.

"The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

"Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. ...

"It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. 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 and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known." -- Carl Sagan

I can't improve on Carl Sagan's words, but they do prompt reflection on how we treat this fragile blue dot, adrift in the vast blackness of space. Sagan urged us to recognize our isolation and the insignificance of this tiny speck in the grand scale of the universe. Yet, we often fail to grasp just how small our planet is and how finite its resources are. Instead of uniting to care for this precious rock we call home, we persist in conflict, missing the opportunity to safeguard our shared future as we journey around an unremarkable star.