Consider 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.
— Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot 1994

Credits: InvisibleMind YouTube