Look again at 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.