On that dot: everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you’ve ever heard of, every human being who ever was lived out their lives.
And I’d like to read you what Carl Sagan wrote about it, just to finish, because I cannot say words as beautiful as this to describe what he saw in that picture that he had taken. He said:
“Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us.
On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you’ve ever heard of, every human being who ever was lived out their lives.
The aggregates of 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.
It’s been said that astronomy’s 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.”
[...]
Let me leave the last words to someone who’s rapidly becoming a hero of mine, Humphrey Davy, who did his science at the turn of the 19th century. He was clearly under assault all the time. We know enough at the turn of the 19th century. Just exploit it; just build things. He said this, he said: “Nothing is more faithful to the progress of the human mind than to presume that our views of science are alternates, that our triumphs are complete, that there are no mysteries in nature, and that there are no new worlds to conquer.”