Tuesday 9 September 2008

A Pale Blue Dot


Consider again 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.

Carl Sagan

4 comments:

Romeo Morningwood said...

Well said Carl, Bravo!
We are inconceivably arrogant.
One must possess an encyclopedic ignorance of history to imagine that the average person will have an opportunity to leave if things don't work out.
Like we have somewhere better to be.

I miss hearing Carl say BillYuns and BillYUNS.

Michelle said...

Paul introduced me to A Pale Blue Dot about a year ago. I love looking at the big picture and this really put things into perspective.

Gordie said...

When I think of all the harm that have been done in our history by people who claimed to know something, and to know what it meant we had to do, I love science, for the way it encourages everybody to find things out and decide for ourselves what they mean.

Mel said...

Wow.

Boy am I feeling 'right sized'....