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Many people feel small, cause they're small and the universe is big. But i feel big.
Because, my atoms, came from those stars.
From this distant vantage point, the earth
might not seem of any particular interest.
But for us,
it's different.
Considering again that dot. That's here.
That's home,
that's us, On it - Everyone you love,
everyone you know,
everyone you've ever heard of, every human being who ever was -
lived out their lives.
The aggregate of our joy and suffer
Thousand 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 politicians
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 eveloping
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: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, 1997 reprint, pp. xv--xv