The Only Home We've Ever Known

All instruments written and recorded by me. Spoken word taken from Carl Sagan's "Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space" (1994).

High-Quality download: http://www.acidplanet.com/artist.asp?PID=1239805&T=5093

The ship was speeding away from the sun at 40,000 miles an hour. Slewing its scan platform from one spot in the sky to another, it snapped sixty pictures. I thought it might be a good idea just after Saturn to have them take one last glance homeward. From Saturn, I knew the earth would appear too small for Voyager to make out any detail. Our planet would be just a point of light, a lonely pixel-hardly distinguishable from the many other points of light Voyager would see...nearby planets, far off suns. But precisely because of the obscurity of our world thus revealed, such a picture might be worth having.

From this distant vantage point, the earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us it's different. Consider again 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 the mote of dust...suspended in a sunbeam.

Humans are inconsequential; a thin film of life on an obscure and solitary lump of rock and metal.

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 can become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. 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.

Category:

Music

Tags:

• pale
• blue
• dot
• the
• only
• home
• we've
• ever
• known
• carl
• sagan
• koyaanisqatsi
• rock
• metal
• instrumental
• guitar

[Marsyas01]

Music needs to be quieter, voice needs to be louder, otherwise, good.

[GeneticsFTW]

Sagan achieved a level of greatness we all can only dream of ever reaching ourselves.

[fancestral]

The music is way too loud! But nice video!

[staffordlad1]

Cool music,and cool video,.Thank you very much also for the Carl Sagan overdub.

[pdNeoGeo]

@NeutroniumIon lol you're retarded.

[KuraiX]

Great vid, man, just reawakened my love for the universe.

[WeDontNeedNoReligion]

JHLUKHRT,

thank you !

This is one fantastic video.

Visitors commenting on voice vs. music miss the point. I applaud your effort to evoke deep emotions with the changing dynamics.

Very effective. I fought tears while watching it for the first time.

Carl Sagan's voice and his message is timeless. With the help of your music there is no question: the outcome is genuine art.

Best wishes.

[gJonii]

Sagans voice was a bit too faint, and music wasn't really fitting at the second part. Other than that, awesome.

[NeutroniumIon]

This was good until that loud noise kicked in after a minute or two.

[drmemento]

i guess I disagree with most of the comments, and thought that the voice vs instruments was about right. You want the power of the instruments to get your blood going. Still, if it made it appeal to more, it probably wouldn't hurt terribly to bring up the voice a little.