Transcript for Pale Blue Dot

"Pale Blue Dot" Written by Carl Sagan USA

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 are 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 the 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 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 know 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.