I got
inspired to write the above when I read “Pale Blue Dot” (thoughts of Carl
Sagan). 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.
