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.

- Carl Sagan

Through centuries past, great leaders have reigned and fallen, incredible cities have been built and razed, wars have been fought, won and lost, men and women have lived, loved, lost, loathed, languished in agony and wept with joy. There have been tragic events that have shaken the world, there have been attrocities that have made thousands weep the world over - briefly unified by their sorrow. There have been awe-inspiring achievements, people marvelling, united as one human race to watch one of us, a lowly human, step foot on Earth's closest companion, the Moon. There have been people who have come and gone, leaving no mark on the world. There have been others who have shaken the very foundations on which the Earth stands.

Somewhere along this immense timeline you have been given an existence - so fleeting, but it is all that you will ever know, and all you require. During your entire life you will experience an incredible range of emotion, you will feel passionately for ideals that seem so amazingly trivial in the grand scheme of things. You will overlook things that seem so amazingly important. You will smile, frown, laugh and cry. You will work, play, succeed and fail. You will love. You will hate. You will grow, mentally and physically. You will learn. You will feel the thrill of importance, and the deep disappointment of insignificance. You will experience such incredible joy - so much joy you can't help but burst out laughing. You will experience heart-wrenching despair. Remorse.

During all this, you will only occassionally pause to consider - perhaps cynically, perhaps with child-like wonder - that everything I've just mentioned happened on nothing more important, nothing more significant in the overwhelming expanse of the Universe, than a speck of dust in a sunbeam. Take a look at the picture in this post. That tiny little speck you see is Earth, shot by Voyager I across the vast emptiness of space. I'd like to summarise using the amazing description of this photo given by Carl Sagan:

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.