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Monday, May 8, 2023

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“Look at that dot again. It's here. It's home. We are. On it, everyone you love, everyone you've ever heard of, every human being who ever lived lived their lives. 

The sum total of our joys and sorrows, a thousand presumptuous religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and gatherer, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and subject, every young couple in love, every mother and father , hopeful son, inventor and explorer, every preacher of morality, every corrupt politician, every "superstar", every "supreme commander", every saint and sinner in the history of our species has lived there on a speck of dust suspended within a beam of Sun. 




Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood shed by all those generals and emperors that, in glory and triumph, they might become the momentary lords of a fraction of a point. 

Think of the endless cruelties meted out by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel to the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager to kill each other, how fervent their hatreds. Our fancies, our imagined self-worth, the illusion 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 darkness, in all this vastness, there is no indication that help can come from anywhere else to save us from ourselves. 

Earth is the only known world that can host life. There is no other place, at least in the foreseeable future, where our species can migrate. Visit, yes. Living, not yet. Whether you like it or not, for now the Earth is where we play our cards. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. 

There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human vanities than this distant image of our tiny world. For me, it underscores our responsibility to care more kindly for one another, and to preserve and protect the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known. ❤️

(Carl Sagan)



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