The following words were written by the late Carl Sagan as he contemplated a picture of Earth taken from deep interplanetary space: "If you look at [that picture] you see a dot. That's here. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of 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 creator and destroyer of civilizations, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every inventor and explorer, every corrupt politician, every superstar, 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 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, are challenged by this point of pale light. "Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In all this vastness there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. To my mind, this distant image of our tiny world 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."
