Text of the message
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.
— Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994