Apple Airs “Earth” – Shot on iPhone TV Commercial Narrated by Carl Sagan

Apple is airing a new Shot on iPhone advertisement, this time focused on the theme of natural images from our home planet Earth.

The TV commercial, which shows various videos of landscapes as captured with an iPhone camera, is narrated by the famous astronomer Carl Sagan, excerpting his book Pale Blue Dot. It has been embedded below for easy viewing, and you will likely see it on television too.

The narration to the Earth – Shot on iPhone TV commercial is as follows:

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. 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.

Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the only home we’ve ever known.

Watch the video here:

The advertisement demonstrates various capabilities of the iPhone camera, including slow motion video capturing and time lapse video recording, both of which are easy to accomplish with the iPhone.

The text accompanying the video as posted on the Apple YouTube page says the following:

Our only home. Shot on iPhone through the lens of everyday users. Written and narrated by Carl Sagan, from the book, Pale Blue Dot — A Vision of the Human Future in Space. #OurOnlyHome #ShotoniPhone

If you enjoyed the video, you’d also likely enjoy reading the Carl Sagan book Pale Blue Dot.

For those interested, the complete unedited and full length quote from the Pale Blue Dot book, which is referencing the famous Voyager 1 photo of the same name, is as follows;

“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 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. 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.

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.”