"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 in 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. 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."
Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in
Space
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