2007-04-28

Perspective

I was Stumbling Upon cause I was bored ( I had to work today I was just relaxing) And I came across this. Its an awesome perspective. Lets you see how insignificant we are. Our speck of dust. And you even see this more by re-reading what I nominated as the quote of the year.

"We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at
it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever
heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate
of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and
economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every
creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young
couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every 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 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 the dot on scarcely distinguishable
inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. 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. It is up to us. It's been said that
astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my
mind, 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 and compassionately with one another and to
preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."

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