On 14 February 1990, the Voyager 1 spacecraft prepared to depart the Solar System. Past the orbit of Neptune, it took one last glance at Earth. Our home planet 6.4 billion kilometres away appeared as nothing but a pale blue dot smaller than a pixel in size, suspended in a ray of light. The photo inspired a passage in a book of Carl Sagan — American astronomer, planetary scientist, cosmologist, astrophysicist and astrobiologist.
“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us,” Sagan wrote. “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 Danish prog rock band Once In Orbit continue the same philosophy on their song “The Martian”. From the surface of Mars, the song’s narrator sees our planet as a “mesmerising sight, the host of all life.“ Such a vast distance makes him see life on Earth from an entirely new perspective. He thinks of the seven billion people going on about their daily struggles, unaware of how beautifully they “light up like candles at night”.
“I guess I’ll buy them a ticket to come see it for themselves,” the Mars resident concludes, understanding that such a drastic action just might inspire humans to be kinder to our home planet and each other.
Meanwhile, the video shows carefree kids running through a field of tall grass, a bird flying peacefully overhead, a couple smiling lovingly at each other. This is then contrasted by the footage of war, explosions and a destroyed city.
“At a first glance, [Mars residents] will see a beautiful world full of life — an amazing ecosystem, which on closer inspection is destroyed by people who fight each other for ideologies and beliefs,” explains Once In Orbit’s guitarist Andreas Friis Rasmussen.
“The Martian” follows Once in Orbit’s earlier single “Pledge Stone” and will be a part of the bands upcoming debut album. The prog rock LP entitled “A Road Less Traveled” will come out in November.
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