"Take one more look at this dot!"
"It is there. That is our home, everything we have."
"Everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you have ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, spent their lives upon it."
"All our joys and sufferings, every religion, ideology, and economic doctrine proclaimed with absolute certainty, every hunter and robber, hero and coward, creator and destroyer of civilization, king and farmer, couple in love, father and mother, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, respected teacher, corrupt politician, superstar, supreme leader, every saint and sinner in human history, all gathered here—a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."
On February 14, 1990, by the Human Common Era calendar, Voyager 1 took a photograph of Earth from 6.4 billion kilometers away. It showed Earth suspended like a speck of dust against the black backdrop of the Solar System. Inspired by the photograph, Carl Sagan wrote Pale Blue Dot, from which the quotation above was drawn.
And now, the humans aboard the Lyra had seen a similar sight, and some of the more sentimental among them read those words aloud.
The scene was so similar—except the Pale Blue Dot that had once referred to Earth had become the entire Milky Way Galaxy.
The vast Milky Way Galaxy, where countless civilizations had once roamed the stars, now looked no more than a tiny point of light because of the distance. Against the deep black backdrop of the universe, it was so minuscule.
Yet within it lay the brilliant stories of countless civilizations, along with innumerable legends of destruction and creation.
All the Stars in the Sky, the North Pole Purple Palace, the Twenty-Eight Mansions, celestial phenomena and constellations—every story was there.
Humanity did not know whether other civilizations had once written books like Pale Blue Dot,