.
. . 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.
. . . . 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 (earth). 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.
.
. . To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with
one another, and to preserve and cherish . . . the only home we've ever
known.
Carl
Sagan
Pale Blue Dot
