Pale Blue Dot in an Indifferent Universe

Look again at that dot. 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.

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

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.

-Carl Sagan

Carl Sagan never fails to humbly remind me of how my petty problems and greivances are so infinitely miniscule when put in the cosmic scale of things. Like I always tell Eggy, I'll never really go into true depression. Because something inside of me always tells me that my personal problems are only exaggerated by self-centred conceitedness. They are nothing compared to the 11 yr old African girl who is struggling to live, whose parents died from AIDS, leaving her in charge of feeding her 6 younger siblings. Nothing compared to the guy who was born without arms, or legs, or eyes.

"For we are the local embodiment of a Cosmos grown to self awareness. We have
begun to contemplate our origins: starstuff pondering the stars; organised
assemblages of ten billion billion billion atoms considering the evolution of
atoms; tracing their long journey by which, here at least, consciousness arose.
Our loyalties are to the species and the planet. We speak for earth. Our
obligation to survive is owed not just to ourselves but also to that Cosmos,
ancient and vast, from which we sprung."

"For most of human history we have searched for our place in the cosmos. Who are we? What are we? We find that we inhabit an insignificant planet of a hum-drum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people. This perspective is a courageous continuation of our penchant for constructing and testing mental models of the skies; the Sun as a red-hot stone, the stars as a celestial flame, the Galaxy as the backbone of night. "

"Every one of us is precious in the cosmic perspective. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another."

Just wanted to share the video, LOL, didnt mean for this to be an emo post. Blame my fascination with the stars :p We live in an awesome universe! Booyah!!