These days it seems like the whole world is looking down on the Middle East. Civil war, drought, refugees and rogue militias paint the region in hues of poverty and pain. You know it’s not the full story - no place can be reduced to a simple stereotype. A stunning series of images from the European Space Agency helps correct this regional tunnel vision. See this part of the planet from a distant vantage point, in remarkable colors and textures that only nature could design.
In 1990, the Voyager 1 spacecraft photographed Earth from nearly four billion miles away. Titled “The Pale Blue Dot”, the image inspired cosmologist Carl Sagan to write:
“Consider … that dot … on it everyone you love, everyone you know, … 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 saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
“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 … there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
“ … 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 … the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.”
These ten images of our spectacular desert landscapes vividly underscore Sagan’s poetic observations and their applicability to the modern Middle East. In the vast cosmos, our planet is but a tiny stage. So go play nicely with others. And don’t litter.
