Pale Blue Dot
Carl Sagan
Carl Sagan
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.
