a community platform dedicated to promoting human and planetary health through plant-based nutrition, kindness, and mutual respect
Find your people.
Message from Ted Barnett, MD, FACLM,
President and Founder,
Rochester Lifestyle Medicine Institute
Pale Blue Dot Community, is a community designed to promote human and planetary health without paid advertisements. It is a space that fosters meaningful connections, authentic conversations and positive emotions.
Rather than being supported by advertisers, where your attention is being sold to the highest bidder, this community platform is supported by generous donors and a subscription fee of $5 per month.
We began this journey with medical professionals and alumni of our programs who believe in the power of Lifestyle Medicine to help heal people and the planet. We are now inviting people with other passions, interests, and expertise who share the same goals.
Please join us in helping to create a healthier world with compassion and joy!
The Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of Earth taken on February 14, 1990 by NASA’s Voyager 1 at a distance of 6 billion kilometers from the Sun. At that time Voyager 1 had traveled well beyond the orbit of Neptune.
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."
Carl Sagan, 1994
From Pale Blue Dot, published in 1994 by Carl Sagan:
"Look again at 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.