The Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of Earth taken on 14 February 1990, by NASA's Voyager 1. American astronomer Carl Sagan had asked for such a photo to be taken. It inspired his book, "Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space," in which he wrote:
“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. 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.
“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 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 this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, 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.
“The Earth is the only world known so far to harbour life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
“It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and 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 with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.”
Sagan’s words written 28 years ago are more relevant than ever as we are still busy destroying this ‘pale blue dot’ instead of preserving it and cherishing it. Still hating and killing instead of dealing more kindly with one another. Wars, the destruction of the planet through the climate crisis we are causing, pandemics and diseases, poverty and illiteracy are still making it impossible for billions of people to live decently like human beings in this tiny home we inhabit.
Instead of working together
Looking at that dot, we can distinguish no countries ... all countries, including major powers are small and “a fraction of a dot in our tiny world.” We keep making grand statements that no country on its own can solve any of our biggest global challenges, yet we are far from doing enough to cooperate globally to save ourselves and our planet.
More than 3 billion people, nearly half the world’s population cannot afford a healthy diet. A diet is considered unaffordable if it costs more than 52% of a household’s income. Asia contains the most number of people unable to afford a healthy diet at 1.89 billion, of which 973 million people are in India alone. Another 1 billion people are in Africa, with around 151 million people in the Americas and Oceania.
90% of the population in Sub-Saharan Africa cannot afford a healthy diet. The climate emergency is at its worst in this part of Africa causing droughts making whole regions unfit for agriculture and uninhabitable, forcing millions of people to migrate.
We still live in a world where more than 13,800 children under the age of 5 die every day (nearly 6 million a year globally) from preventable infectious diseases like malaria, pneumonia and diarrhoea.
The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) was set up in 1946, to provide emergency food and healthcare to children and mothers in countries that had been devastated by World War II. 20 days ago it appealed for US$10.3 billion to reach more than 110 million children with humanitarian assistance in 2023. UNICEF says there are more children in need of humanitarian assistance today than at any other time since World War II. This year the number of people needing humanitarian assistance reached 324 million but the UN had funds for only 41% of their needs.
According to UNICEF more than 440 million children live in areas under conflict; an estimated 1 billion children – nearly half the world’s children – live in countries at extreme vulnerability to the impacts of climate change; at least 36.5 million children have been displaced from their homes; and 8 million children under age 5 across 15 crisis-hit countries are at risk of death from severe wasting.
Nearly 303 million children and young people aged between 5 and 17 years old – around 1 in 5 – are out of school globally. Poverty remains the most significant barrier to education globally with the poorest primary school age children 4 times more likely to be out of school compared to their peers from the richest households.
73 million young people throughout the world are unemployed.
Last year total global military expenditure reached $2113 billion, the highest in human history. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) says that the five largest spenders in 2021 were the United States, China, India, the United Kingdom and Russia, together accounting for 62 per cent of expenditure. Global military expenditure is set to continue growing in the coming years, militarising further the relations between states and weakening diplomacy to resolve conflicts while taking away resources that are badly needed for the climate crisis, health, nutrition, education and development.