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.