Much of the science on Cosmos: a Spacetime Odyssey makes my head explode. Although I “get it” in the general sense, true
comprehension is beyond my high-school level scope of knowledge. But the
message in the final episode rang clear as a bell. I wish that everyone,
particularly those who are about to add another layer of violence and hatred to
human history, would take just a few minutes to really listen to Carl Sagan’s
extraordinary Pale Blue Dot speech:
"From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any
particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot.
That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you
know, everyone 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, 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.
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 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.
The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbor 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 conceits than this distant
image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more
kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only
home we've ever known."
The Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of planet Earth taken in 1990 by the Voyager 1 space probe from a record distance of about 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles, 40 AU) from Earth. The Voyager 1 spacecraft, which had completed its primary mission and was leaving the Solar System, was commanded by NASA to turn its camera around and to take a photograph of Earth across a great expanse of space, at the request of Carl Sagan.
(excerpted from Wikipedia)
