Science, like love, is a means to that transcendence, to that soaring experience of the oneness of being fully alive. The scientific approach to natu… - Ann Druyan

The vastness of the universe-and love, the thing that makes the vastness bearable-is out of reach to the arrogant.

The words Einstein chose to open the 1939 World's Fair echo in my brain: "If science, like art, is to perform its mission truly and fully, its achievements must enter not only superficially but with their inner meaning into the consciousness of the people."

In that photo ("Pale Blue Dot"), the inner meaning of four centuries of astronomical research is suddenly available to all of us at a glance. It is scientific data and art equally, because it has the power to reach into our souls and alter our consciousness. It is like a great book or movie, or any major work of art. It can pierce our denial and allow us to feel something of reality-even a reality that some of us have long resisted. A world that tiny cannot possibly be the center of a cosmos of all that is, let alone the sole focus of its creator. The pale blue dot is a silent rebuke to the fundamentalist, the nationalist, the militarist, the polluter-to anyone who does not put above all other things the protection of our little planet and the life that it sustains in the vast cold darkness. There is no running away from the inner meaning of this scientific achievement.