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.
