🌍 The Pale Blue Dot 🌍

From this distant vantage point, the earth might not seem of any particular interest, But for us its different, Consider again that dot, thats here, thats home, thats us. On it, every one you love, every one you know, every one 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, ever hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilisation, 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 the mote of dust suspended in a sun beam. 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 hatred. 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 spec, 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 our selves! The earth is the only world known so far to harbour 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 conceit, than this distant image of our tiny world. To me it under scores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we have ever known.