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 posturing’s, 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
.
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.
By Carl Sagan
