Carl Sagan Had it All Together
Have you ever gotten to a point in your life when you felt useless
because you weren’t feeding starving children in Somalia or
researching Light Speed Space Travel?
Ever pondered the Sum Total of
Your Existence?
Carl Sagan contemplated
a picture of Earth, taken from the Voyager spacecraft in deep
interplanetary space:
“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.”
Every day I wake up pissed at
myself because I cant understand why I can’t value any of the things I
do or anything that someone else does. Carl Sagan had it all together
and it makes me want to stab him in the eye with a rusty corkscrew.
I want to know how to feel this way about
the planet, the people, and the places on it.
In Other News:
– Jerry got so annoyed with Julie he
pushed her into some bushes
–
The Speaker at the US Foreign Policy Symposium was very interesting.
Did you know we strong armed the Afghani People into electing Karzai?
It turns out the US values stable governments more than Democratic
ones.
– I spent 6:30 sitting in
plastic chairs today
– PJ got
tricked into Jewing an innocent man for biting his pretzel
– I survived the Hanta Virus
– I’m sorry for using so many quotes in
place of actual, real writing, but I just couldn’t turn Carl down