Mote of Dust Part 1: Pale Blue Dot

The earth is a very small stage, in a vast cosmic arena

Think of the endless cruelties visited upon 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, our 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 known so far to harbor life

There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate

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