That Dot. Look once more.

And again

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That’s what they named the photograph the Voyager took of our Earth in 1990 from a distance of six billion ( 6.000.000.000.000 ) kilometers away, the moment it was just about to leave our galaxy. Why this old news now and why here? Because it may be too late or maybe not to adjust and Carl Sagan, the American astronomer, dedicated a more than beautiful poem to it. Watch the rhythm, the cadence. It is sheer beauty and beyond words.

“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 all of our joy and all of our 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 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.”

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