There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. 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. 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 hatreds. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, 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 a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. Carl Sagan’s timeless and humbling Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, based on the photograph above.

Pale blue dot