What could be more precise and truthful depiction of life on earth than this timeless, eloquent musing of the irreplaceable Carl Sagan? It was February 14, 1990, when the Voyager 1 spacecraft took the iconic photograph of the Pale Blue Dot. An excerpt from Carl Sagan’s “A Pale Blue Dot” Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.” There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. In our obscurity, in all its vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. 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. 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. 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. “The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.
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