Transcript for Speaker Carolyn Porco

[Clapping]

Thank you, thank you.

Carolyn Porco. Planetary Scientist.

I'd like to begin today with a remarkable story

about the inhabitants of a rocky little ocean-covered world

in orbit around an ordinary star

one of hundreds of billions of stars in an ordinary galaxy

in a universe filled with a hundred billion galaxies.

This story goes that these beings, with soaring imagination

and refusing to accept limitations

developed the languages of mathematics and science

became skilled technologists and eventually

flung themselves and their machines off their plantes

and into outer space.

And they did this merely in response to an innate desire

to explore and to learn and to secure their future

and to seek the answers to questions that had vexed them

and every generation of their ancestors before them.

How is it that their small planet and them living on it

came to be?

And what is the great cosmic theater in which

life on their planet had unfolded?

Well this is a story about us.

And we humans have been interplanetary mariners now

for over fifty years.

We have walked on our own moon

and we have sent robotic space craft

to every corner of the solar system and beyond

all in search for answers to these questions.

And these robotic, epic journeys have indeed

rewarded us with insights into the origin of the earth

and its sibling planets

and they have shown us with startling clarity our cosmic place.

The latest chapter in this story is presently being written

at Saturn, where our cameras there have recently acquired

a picture of a sight that no human had ever seen before

a total eclipse of the sun, in which

we can spot across a billion miles of interplanetary space

our own planet Earth

cradled in the arms of Saturn's rings.

[Applause]

As evidenced by your reaction there is something powerful

a powerful recognition that stirs within us

when we see our home floating in the skies of other worlds.

In an instant we can see how small, fragile, and alone

we all really are.

And we can see ourselves, our species brave and unyielding

and it's struggle to grasp the meaning

and the significance of its own existance

and we can see how hopeful we were

to even imagine that we could cross

the enormous distances separating the planets

and how daring and far reaching we are for actually having done it.

And finally, in this picture we can find

the very best in each and every one of us.

We are perhaps the small and troubled inhabitants

of one tiny little planet

but we are also the dreamers of big dreams

and the thinkers and the explorers who took this picture.

One world to another, the extraordinary inhabitants of planet Earth.

And now, let's listen to the moving words

of my friend and colleague the late Carl Sagan

as he describes that pale blue dot.