Dot Connections

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.