Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark

We humans are highly flawed and we certainly spend an inordinate amount of time bickering. But when we are good, sometimes we are spectacular. Take Voyager 1. From Voyager 1 just fired up some thrusters for the first time in 37 years
The only human-made object outside our solar system is still alive and kickin' by Rachel Feltman. Carl Sagan is gone 21 years and his progeny sails ghostly, alone, but still speaking to us from deep space, beyond the boundaries of our solar system.

When Voyager 1's trajectory correction maneuver thrusters last fired, Ronald Reagan had just been elected president. Over 30 years ago, about a decade into the spacecraft's journey out to the edge of our solar system and beyond, the thrusters had officially served their purpose. The trajectory correction maneuver (TCM) thrusters sent out little puffs of power to correct the object's course, allowing Voyager 1 to explore Jupiter, Saturn, and several moons orbiting them. After the last course correction for Saturn on November 8, 1980, the TCMs went silent.

Last week, NASA scientists fired them up again. And 37 years after being put out to pasture, the thrusters worked. They could even extend the mission of the invaluable space probe by several years.

Voyager 1 is an important vessel. It's the fastest spacecraft we've got, traveling at around 11 miles per second. It's also the farthest. Its twin, Voyager 2, is nearly 11 billion miles away from the Sun, pushing through the last layer of our host star's influence on the space around our system. But Voyager 1 is over 13 billion miles away from the Sun, and has the incredible distinction of being the first human-made object to enter interstellar space.

Yet even from that great distance, the probe still sends messages back to Earth. That's where the thrusters come in. For decades, a set of thrusters has served to set out tiny, split-second pulses to keep the craft's antenna pointed toward us. Now those thrusters are getting old, and it's taking more effort to make Voyager 1 move. The solution? See if the TCM thrusters—which on the one hand haven't been worn out by constant use over the last few decades, but on the other hand haven't even been turned on—could take on some of the legwork.

“The Voyager flight team dug up decades-old data and examined the software that was coded in an outdated assembler language, to make sure we could safely test the thrusters," Chris Jones, chief engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab, said in a statement.

It takes 19 hours and 35 minutes for a signal from Voyager 1 to bounce back to Earth, but after a day of waiting the scientists confirmed that the hardware had fired right up. Their current plan is to switch from the primary thrusters over to the TCMs sometime in the next few months. Unfortunately, the TCM thrusters only work if a set of small heaters are turned on, and Voyager 1 won't have the power to keep them burning forever. But for as long as they last, the original thrusters will get a much-needed rest. The Voyager team expects to have to start flipping off switches in the 2020s, and the probe will likely be completely incommunicado after 2025 or so. But anything we can do to keep in touch with our interstellar buddy for just a little longer gives us a better chance of learning about our region of space.

After that, our research probe will turn into more of time capsule. Voyager 1 won't reach another star for around 40,000 years. Perhaps humanity will be a true spacefaring race by that time, with vessels scattered across the galaxy that manage to outpace our first little beacon into the beyond. But if humanity is long gone, we may make a kind of posthumous contact with other intelligent life. Voyagers 1 and 2 both carry copies of the Golden Record. It's more symbolic than anything—no one expects aliens to know what a record is and how to play it, let alone understand human languages—but just as ancient, sometimes unintelligible cave paintings tell us that our ancestors once roamed distant lands, the etchings on these records will say that we were here. And that we wanted to look for something more.

Sometimes, as a species, we have our moments. Voyager 1 and its tiny whispers way out there beyond boundaries which are barely comprehensible is one example of our better selves.

Carl Sagan gets the last word. From Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, published a couple of years before his passing.

Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, 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 "superstar", every "supreme leader", every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. 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. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. 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 and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.