Consider again 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.
