PERHAPS THE BEST OF CARL SAGAN'S BOOKS." -The Washington Post Book World (front page review) In Cosmos, the late astronomer Carl Sagan cast his gaze over the magnificent mystery of the Universe and made it accessible to millions of people around the world. Neither that dot, nor we, are nearly as majestic as we like to presume. It’s a pathetically small dot we inhabit, but it is also the only dot we have. And yet earth is the only planet known to have life. There are 2 trillion (2,000,000,000,000) galaxies known to exist in the observable universe. There are 200 billion (2,000,000,000) solar systems in the our milky-way galaxy. When you next have the slightest arrogance to believe you are important, that a problem you have is important, that anything you know is important, think of this. The mightiest among us, the most powerful we know, are all but fleeting masters on micro-fractions of a dot. 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.Ĭopyright © 1994 by Carl Sagan, Copyright © 2006 by Democritus Properties, LLC.Īll rights reserved including the rights of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.” There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. 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 this 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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