“The Only Home We’ve Ever Known”

My dear friend Harry sent me this YouTube link of Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot, a grace note after reconnecting at the Natural Living Expo this year. I saved it to share for the New Year.

With his confidently reassuring voice, the famous astronomer shares three minutes of cosmic commentary, portraying the preciousness of our existence on Earth, despite our obscurity in the vastness of the universe. Within this cosmic perspective, every little anxiety or petty disagreement completely evaporates. Even the big challenges pale.

And we are reminded, once again, of the vastness of our superpower here on Earth to consciously create our health, our relationships and the world around us one thought at a time.

That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, 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.

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 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 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, 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.

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. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment Earth is where we make our stand.

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. 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.

Transcript from Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot OFFICIAL.

Carol Bedrosian is the founder and publisher of Spirit of Change since 1987. She can be reached at carol@spiritofchange.org.