Life on a sunbeam
The most moving piece I've ever read about the beauty, fragility and uniqueness of our planet came from the American astronomer Carl Sagan.
In 1990, when Voyager 1 was some 4 billion miles from Earth, he persuaded NASA to point its camera back
at us and take this photo from the edge of the solar system..
Here's what he had to say about it
"We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us.
On it, everyone you've ever heard of, every human being who ever lived has 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."
