http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Blue_Dot
Carl Sagan:
"We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you
look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On
it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you've ever heard
of, every human being who ever was 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 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.
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. It is up
to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might
add, a character-building experience. 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 this pale blue dot, the only
home we've ever known."
