Pale Blue dot ...
JB
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."