‘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 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.’
‘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 that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known’. ~ Carl Sagan, Cosmos
From the BBC Radio 4 series ‘Great Lives’ listen here.
Updated to add this link from The Big Picture: images from Cassini, a space probe orbiting Saturn.
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whoa ~ that gets you thinking! ;0)
sas Replied:
innit tho?!
“The folly of human conceits” indeed. This morning I found myself arguing with my boss over the size of a font and a shade of magenta for a direct-mail piece, and then I read an article in AdAge by the head of BBDO in Thailand on how they were forced to evacuate their offices and home and are living in hiding while their city is torn asunder by Red Shirts. Meanwhile major corporations point fingers at each other over the oil spill, and thousands of Gulf-coast Americans stand on a beach awaiting the flood of tar that will forever change their shores in the next 72 hours. When will we learn?
sas Replied:
i listened to the radio 4 show on the way home and it ends with sagan reading the first part of his quote. it made me tear up! i love the perspective that astronomy brings. the smallness of ‘us’.
jo has written a gorgeous post on this too.
I’ve been watching the Universe series on TV with Steven Hawking and it’s amazing. It’s so true…we are just a speck. Like a Who with Horten and Dr. Suess.
:-)