Carl Sagan's wonderful "Pale Blue Dot" Video (3min 31sec). Look again at that 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 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, 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.
