On Valentine’s Day in 1990, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft captured an iconic and humbling image of Earth at a distance of six billion kilometres from the Sun. The ‘Pale Blue Dot’ photo, as it has since become widely known, moved venerable scientist Carl Sagan to remark upon how our home planet is but a “small stage in a great cosmic arena”. Standing in a cemetery honouring fallen World War I soldiers as a child, and gazing upon the scores of white crosses as far as the eye could see, Lucas Woodland was reminded of that image when he suddenly felt the weight of the world’s insignificance on his young shoulders. “It was breathtaking seeing thousands of these – and I don’t mean to sound rude or disrespectful here – almost pathetically small white c...