Destination X

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“Pale Blue Dot” by Carl Sagan

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From this distant vantage point,

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the earth might not seem of any particular interest.

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But for us, it’s different.

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Consider again that dot. That’s here.

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That’s home. That’s us.

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On it, everyone you love, everyone you know,

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everyone you ever heard of. Every human being who ever was

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lived out their lives.

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The aggregate of our joy and suffering.

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Thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines,

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every hunter and forager, every hero and coward,

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every creator and destroyer of civilization.

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every king and peasant, every young couple in love,

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every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer,

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every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician,

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every superstar, every supreme leader

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every saint and sinner in the history of our species

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lived there.

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On the mote of dust.

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Suspended in a sunbeam.

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The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.

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Think of the rivers of blood

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spilled by all those generals and emperors

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so that in glory and in triumph they could become

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the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

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Think of the endless cruelties visited

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by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel

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on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner.

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How frequent their misunderstandings,

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how eager they are to kill one another,

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how fervent their hatreds.

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Our posturings, our imagined self-importance,

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the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe,

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are challenged by this point of pale light.

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Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark.

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In our obscurity — in all this vastness

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there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere

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to save us from ourselves.

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The earth is the only world know so far to harbor life.

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There is nowhere else, at least in the near future

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to which our species could migrate.

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Visit? Yes. Settle? Not yet.

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Like it or not, for the moment, the earth is where we make our stand.

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It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience.

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There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits

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than this distant image of our tiny world.

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To me, it underscores our responsibility

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to deal more kindly with one another

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and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.