I wonder how many people have seen this (kudos to Byrne at Majordojo for making this available):
From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest, but for us it's different. 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, 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 that 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 harbor 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.
- Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994
Carl Sagan (1934 ñ 1996) was an astronomer who truly championed astronomy, astrophysics, and other natural sciences. He also promoted the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) and gained world-fame for writing popular science books and for co-writing and presenting the award-winning 1980 television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, which is said to have been seen seen by a half-a-billion, making it the most widely watched PBS television program in history.
Posted by Mikal at September 12, 2007 9:18 AM
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Comments:
May he be remembered for billions and billions of years.
Astronomy was one of my first great loves. There is still a special place in my heart for it. That place will get bigger when I can afford a 30" Schmidt-Cassegrain.
Very cool, and a great perspective. I have added an entry to my own blog with a link back to your post here. I tried to do it with a trackback but am obviously incompetent at it. Thanks for this reminder of how much everything we worry about really means.
Posted by:Ken Krause at September 13, 2007 10:36 AM
