Whoah.

Thanks to the SomethingAwful forums, I found one of my favourites quotes from Carl Sagan again after loosing it a while back and felt compelled to post it here. It just blows me away each time, particularly when you put it in context with this picture, taken by Voyager 1 as it was 4 billion miles away from Earth and swung round for one last photo of "home".

We succeeded in taking that picture, 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.