When I’m stressed about something, I’ll sometimes close my eyes and imagine myself looking at Earth from NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft, admiring just how small Earth is.
It’s a speck. Or, as Carl Sagan famously described it, a “pale blue dot…a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”
Framing things this way isn’t meant to deny the reality of the challenge we’re facing, nor does it offer any promise of magically dissolving away the work that must be done to solve it.
But thinking about the relative scale of the planet, our existence within it, and the challenges within it, does humble you quite a bit and at least make you wonder: How big can this challenge really be? How serious can it really be?
