The Pale Blue Dot

Psalm 8:3-4

‘When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them?’

I’m old enough to have lived through the great early years of space exploration. Reading of Yuri Gagarin’s brief minutes in space was very exciting – it made being a physics student seem almost on-trend! – and those fuzzy live pictures of Neil Armstrong jumping from his ladder onto the surface of the moon, very slowly in the low gravity, were breathtaking. But for me I think the most romantic expeditions so far have been the journeys of Voyager 1 and 2, launched in 1977 and still journeying on. By now they have moved beyond the solar wind and travel on into interstellar space, 11 and 14 billion miles from home and still, miraculously, collecting and sending back information. Has anything ever been more lonely?

In 1990, at a distance of 3.7 billion miles and still travelling at 40,000 miles an hour, Voyager 1 turned its camera round and took a last image of Earth, just one pixel, a tiny, pale blue dot in the vastness of space. The cosmologist Carl Sagan has written lyrically of how, on this very dot, every single tyrant in history has strutted his stuff, every empire rose and fell, every battle was fought, every farmer planted and harvested, every mother cradled her baby.

And to this tiny fragment of his universe came Jesus, the Creator of it all. Came to show the love of God, to redeem his creation, to die and rise for all of us. The Psalmist had it right – we don’t deserve that love, that redemption. But God loves us, and to our total amazement he is mindful of us and cares for us.

Meditation – At the beginning of this week, we were asked to appreciate God’s Book of Works in a leaf, a cloud, a mountain, and give thanks and praise. Now turn your eyes to the stars, in awe that the Creator of all this cares for us – who live on the Pale Blue Dot.