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.
