Words to Live By

As a prelude to the “Science Way of Thinking” (one of my next postings) I thought I'd post this. I’ve always been a big fan of science; I always wondered why things worked the way they did. I started reading non-fiction science books as early as age 11. The first ‘real’ book I read was “Cosmos” by Carl Sagan. I recommend that you at least search through amazon.com through the reviews and see what people thought of it. Cosmos lead me into reading almost all of Sagan’s other works, and this post concerns the sequel to Cosmos, a book called Pale Blue Dot. The name Pale Blue Dot comes for the picture displayed above, which shows our beloved planet as seen from Voyager 1, 3.7 billion miles away.
If a picture says a thousand words, this say a million, and who would be better to describe it than the author. The description below, represents the most moving words I have ever read. There is so much thought, emotion, and wisdom in those words, please read on.

“... 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. 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.
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. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the 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. “