Look again at that dot. That's here.
That's home. That's us. On it everyone you
love, everyone you know, everyone you've
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 of 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 and
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 of 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 a 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.
 
