| "We succeeded in
taking that picture, 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 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... 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, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human
Future in Space |
