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In 1989, Voyager 1 passed the orbits of Neptune and Pluto.
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The mission of the voyager spacecraft was complete.
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And so, the cameras were turned back to catch a fleeting glimpse of the Earth we call home.
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After a 12 year, 4 billion mile journey to the edge of the solar system, this is what Voyager saw of
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our home, the Earth...
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The Voyager space probe is nearly the fastest vehicle ever created by man.
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and will travel across the depths of space for millions of years to come.
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11 miles
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...every second.
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The closest sun to our own is proxima centauri. a little over 4 lightyears away.
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At 11 miles/second, voyager wouldn´t reach proxima centauri...
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...until around 73,500 A.D.
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...but most stars are much farther away.
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How about the 3 stars of orion´s belt?
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The closest one, Alnitak, is about 800 lightyears away.
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...190 times the distance to proxima centauri.
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meaning that given 13.5 million years
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Voyager could go from here...
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...to here
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Our galaxy is estimated to contain more than 200 billion suns.
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Starting to see the scope of things?
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NO.
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It turns out, the milky way galaxy is not the only galaxy.
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This is a small part of a deep space image taken by the Hubble telescope.
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The full image contains around 3000 galaxies.
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...and covers an area equivalent to a grain of rice held at arms lenght.
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One 27,000,000th of the whole sky.
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Cosmologists estimate there are roughly 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe.
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Now look again at the pale blue dot
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Take a good, long look at it.
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This is our home.
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Did God create the whole Universe just for that speck?
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or did God create the whole Universe just for ONE of the 10 million species of life located there?
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Take it a step further.
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Imagine that everything was made just for a single shade of that species, or religious subdivision.
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...Or perhaps the whole universe was created only for humans on that pale dot...
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...who think a certain way?
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Or, pick another dot...
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Perhaps they, too, cherish the notion of a God who created everything just for them.
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How do you defend your own beliefs?
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I´m an atheist.
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I don´t know why the universe happened or the meaning of life.
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But I believe that to answer that question with any cerainty is an attempt to elevate one´s ego to a
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level of relative importance...
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...above and beyond the simple reality that is elegantly revealed and shown evident.
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With this photograph