| HN Mirror

> It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience.

- Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994

Full text, narrated by the man himself:

    From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular
    interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again 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.

And another one, again narrated by Carl Sagan, kind of looping back to The Last Question:

https://youtu.be/o9tDO3HK20Q

    We were hunters and foragers.
    The frontier was everywhere.
    
    We were bounded only by the earth,
    and the ocean, and the sky.
    The open road still softly calls.
    
    Our little terraqueous globe
    is the madhouse of those
    hundred, thousands, millions of worlds.
    
    We who can not even put our own planetary home in order
    weaven with rivalries and hatreds;
    are we to venture into space?
    
    By the time we're ready to settle even the nearest other planetary system,
    we will have changed.
    
    The simple passage of so many generations will have changed us.
    Necessity will have changed us.
    We're an adaptable species
    
    It will not be we who reach Alpha Centauri and the other nearby stars.
    It will be a species very like us,
    but with more of our strengths,
    and fewer of our weaknesses.
    
    More confident,
    farseeing,
    capable,
    and prudent.
    For all our failings,
    despite of our limitations and fallibilities
    we humans are capable of greatness.
    
    What new wonders, undreamt of in our time,
    we will have wrought in another generation?
    And another?
    
    How far will our nomadic species have wandered by the end of the next century?
    and the next millenium?
    
    Our remote descendants, safely arrayed on many worlds through the solar system
    and beyond
    will be unified
    by their common heritage,
    by the regard for their home planet,
    and by the knowledge
    that whatever other life may be,
    the only humans in all the universe
    come from Earth.
    
    They will gaze up
    and strain to find
    the blue dot in their skies.
    
    They will marvel
    at how vulnerable
    the repository of our potential once was.
    How perilous our infancy.
    How humble our beginnings.
    how many rivers we had to cross
    before we found our way.