Carl Sagan - Pale Blue Dot

Text from the book The Pale Blue Dot, by Carl Sagan. Read by Carl Sagan.

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 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 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, 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.