The Pale Blue Dot

Here it is: the Earth from Voyager 1, momentarily in a sunbeam. Take a look. From the outskirts of the planetary part of the solar system, it's a pale blue dot.

That's us. That's home. That's where we are. On it, everybody you loved, everybody you know, everybody you have ever heard of, lived out their days. The aggregate of all our joy and suffering, thousands of confident ideologies, religions, 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 revered teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there.

The Earth is a very small stage in a great cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors, presidents and prime ministers and party leaders, so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a corner of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one part of the dot on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of another part 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 priviliged position in the universe, seem to me 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 there is anyone who will come and save us from ourselves.

-Carl Sagan, from a Public Lecture delivered
October 13, 1994, at Cornell University