I just found this amazing article which is similar to the one I wrote
some months ago, but, of course, it is better written than mine,
considering that it was written by Carl Sagan (1934-1996), an astronomer
who knew exactly how to get to our hearts by showing us the truth of
our existence. Enjoy!
Image taken by the Cassini space probe showing the Earth from Saturn!
"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 (1934-1996), Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, 1997 reprint
