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 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.
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, 1994
