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Current mood:  peaceful
"Look the
pale blue 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 misunderstandin..gs, 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."
-Carl Sagan, 1994
8:32 PM
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