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 live out their lives.
The aggregate of our joy and suffering,
Thousands of confident religious, ideologies
and economic doctrines.
Every hunter and forager, every hero and coward,
Every creator and destroyer of civilisation,
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.
There 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 all the cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one
corner of this pixelon 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 this universe,
are challenged by this point of pale light.
Our planet is a lonely speck in the 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 harbour 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,
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 demonstrations 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 . The pale Blue Dot.