“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 have ever known. "
-Carl Sagan
