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The insignificance of us in the Universe!
The significance of us on this world!
Very cleverly portrayed by an astronomer!
The astronomer, Carl Sagan, with an insight -
and eyes – sees the world, the earth
as a mere “pale blue dot”.
A dot in this vast endless Universe!

And yet, the people,
the dots on the outer surface of THE DOT,
acting pompous, egoistic, arrogant
and all knowing.
Some, humble and fearful of the unknown,
the unknown omnipotent, omnipresent God.
Some, with curious and inquisitive minds
looking for answers -
looking for explanations, to our very being!

Those are just my thoughts after reading,
digesting “Pale Blue Dot” by Carl Sagan
I am thankful for Destination X
for sharing this wonderful extract

I reproduce it below for my benefit
and also for the benefit of anyone else:

Sagan pointed out that "all of human history has happened on that tiny pixel (shown here inside a blue circle), which is our only home" (speech at Cornell University, October 13, 1994.)

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 are 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 the 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 in 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 posturing, 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.

===================
P.S.
Note on the image and extract above:
The Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of planet Earth taken in 1990 by the Voyager 1 spacecraft from a record distance of about 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles) from Earth, as part of the solar system Family Portrait series of images. In the photograph, Earth is shown as a tiny dot (0.12 pixel in size) against the vastness of space.[2] The Voyager 1 spacecraft, which had completed its primary mission and was leaving the Solar System, was commanded by NASA to turn its camera around and to take a photograph of Earth across a great expanse of space, at the request of Carl Sagan.

Subsequently, the title of the photograph was used by Sagan as the main title of his 1994 book, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space.[3]

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Blue_Dot

===========================================
P.S. From my DVD collection
I walked into Siberian prison
I witnessed the misery, of imprisonment,
I walked through snow storms
I walked through sand storms
I saw mirages, mountains, quicksilver sand
I sensed the feeling of comrade
among  different people
with different backgrounds,
countries, belief systems, & habits.
I lived through separations & deaths.
I experienced tolerance and trust
in the THE WAY BACK!