|
Look again at that dot. That's there. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone
you know, everyone you ever heard of, human beings 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 super star, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived
there, on a mote of dust in a sunbeam.
The “ Earth “ is a very 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 would become momentary
master 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, 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 spec in the
great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that
will come 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 then this distant image of our
tiny world. To me, in 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, Pale Blue Dot, 1994
|
