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 ihabitants 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
that this distant image.
To me,
it undescores 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.
