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 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.