Pale Blue Dot is a photo of Earth taken in 1990, from a distance of approximately 6 billion kilometers away, by the Voyager 1 space probe as it was leaving our solar system.
Carl Sagan was an American astronomer, planetary scientist, cosmologist, astrophysicist, astrobiologist, science communicator, author, and professor.
He died in 1996 at the age of 62, just two years after he wrote these words.
Some might say that this is not, technically, a poem.
I disagree.
Poetry is not words on a page, carefully laid out line by line and sent into the world in printed collections by book publishers. Poetry, to me, is both a transcendent experience and the attempt to capture that transcendent experience in words. So Carl Sagan’s words are poetry, maybe as pure as any poem written by any of the great poets.
You can read the transcript here.
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