The Voyager 1 spacecraft was launched by NASA in 1977. Its original mission was to visit and photograph Jupiter and Saturn. As Voyager 1 departed the solar system, at the request of Carl Sagan, NASA commanded the craft to take a photograph of the Earth from a distance of several billion kilometers. This photograph became the foundation for Sagan’s 1994 book Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space. The following excerpt from the first Chapter in Sagan’s book offers one of the most amazing and humbling perspectives about the human race and our place in the universe.

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There is somebody out there for everybody. That’s the cliché, or a variation thereof, we tell each other during times of loneliness. And there is somebody for everybody, except for that one person. You know the one. That man or woman who totally screwed you over, who lied to you, who cheated on you and did everything wrong when you did everything right in that failed relationship. That person is without redemption, has no soul and is not deserving of anyone ever again. It’s similar to that person who cut you off in traffic. They are a horrible person who deserves to die, even though you’ve made the exact same mistake before while you were driving.

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The crafters of the Declaration of Independence for the United States believed that all men had certain unalienable rights, that of “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Happiness is something that may not be unique to humanity, for as far as we can understand empirically, it seems that animals experience similar emotions of happiness and sadness. Nevertheless, humans are unique in that we have built a social construct around happiness and we can synthesize happiness no matter what our present situation.

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Death (n.) — the permanent end of all life functions in an organism or part of an organism

When human beings experiences death, all our functions of life end permanently. We can no longer think, act or make decisions that will affect the world. Everything that we were becomes a part of the past. We can discuss the contributions of those who have died, we can even write books about them and build monuments if we consider their lives sufficiently noteworthy, but their ability to contribute to the here and present now is at an end. All humans die eventually. You and I will one day cease to have the ability to use our minds, in conjunction with our bodies, to interact with this world.

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One of the great unanswered questions in physics is that of how we progress through time. When we talk about space, our location in this physical reality, we can travel in any direction. An astronaut or cosmonaut in an orbiting ship or station can move in any combination of six directions in our three dimensional universe. But when it comes to the fourth dimension, time, we can only move at a constant rate and in one direction: forward. If we travel fast enough, we can slow down our progression through time, but only relative to others who are not traveling at the same speed. We can not move in the opposite direction. It’s a principal physicists agree upon, but we still don’t fully understand why this is so.

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In the old testament Bible in the book of Genesis, Chapter 20, Abraham was told by God to take his son to a mountain in Moriah and sacrifice his child. He travels to the mountain with his son, builds an alter and then binds his son and prepares to sacrifice him, but God sends an angle to stop the sacrifice and provides an animal to be slaughtered instead, telling Abraham that this was a test to see if he feared God by not withholding his only son.

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Often you may hear devout followers in a afterlife based religion saying something to the effect of, “Though tough times may come, they will only last for a little while, heaven is our home.”

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