“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.”
Carl Sagan
