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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.