WEBVTT

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That's here, that's home, that's us.

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On it everyone you love, everyone you know,

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everyone you ever heard of,

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every human being who ever was,

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lived out their lives.

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The aggregate of our joy and suffering

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thousands of confident religions, 
ideologies, and economic doctrines,

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every hunter and forager,

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every hero and coward, every creator 
and destroyer of civilization,

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every king and peasant,

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every young couple in love,

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every mother and father,

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hopeful child,

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inventor and explorer,

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every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician,

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every superstar, every supreme leader,

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every saint and sinner in the history of our species

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lived there, on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

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The earth is a very small stage

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in a vast cosmic arena.

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Think of the rivers of blood

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spilled by all those generals and emperors

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so that in glory and triumph

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they could become the momentary masters

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of a fraction of a dot.

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Think of the endless cruelties visited

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by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel

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on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner.

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How frequent their misunderstandings,

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how eager they are to kill one another,

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how fervent their hatreds.

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Our posturings, our imagined self-importance,

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the delusion we have 
some privileged position in the universe,

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are challenged by this point of pale light.

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Our planet is a lonely speck

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in the great enveloping cosmic dark.

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In our obscurity, in all this vastness

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there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere

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to save us from ourselves.

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The earth is the only world known so far, to harbour life.

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There is nowhere else, at least in the near future,

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to which our species could migrate.

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Visit? Yes. Settle? Not yet!

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Like it or not, for the moment, 
the earth is where we make our stand.

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It has been said that astronomy is a 
humbling and character building experience

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There is perhaps no better 
demonstration of the folly of human conceits

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than this distant image of our tiny world.

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To me, it underscores our responsibility 
to deal more kindly with one another

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and to preserve and cherish

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the pale blue dot,

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the only home we've ever known.