We succeeded in taking that picture, and,
if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it,
everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their
lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident
religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every
hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and
peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and
father, every 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 in 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 the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of
some other corner of the dot. 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 my mind, 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 and
compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue
dot, the only home we've ever known.
— Carl
Sagan, speech at Cornell University, October 13, 1994
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.