By: Carl Sagan
"We succeeded in taking that
picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot.
That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of,
every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate
of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions,
ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero
and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king
and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every
mother and father, every 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 in
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 the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner
of the dot. 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. It is up to us.
It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a
character building experience. To my mind, 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 and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish
that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."
- Carl Sagan -