A PALE BLUE DOT

Pale Blue Dot
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.