From this distant vantage point, the Earth
might not seem of any particular interest.
But for us, it's different. Consider 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 a 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.
