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 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
Purnima
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, you know, the score is 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
You
