“All of the actors who trained in it, in the beginning, [we] had the response that some of the audience had. We’re a bunch of actors, we’re not dancers, we’re not even necessarily particularly athletic, some of us, and we’re just showing up in our sweats in a room. We’ve all just met each other and now we’re going to move our body in ways we’ve never moved them before? And we’re going to do it in front of each other? In the beginning, you’re embarrassed, you’re ashamed, you laugh a little to make it feel OK, but by the time we were doing those movements for two or three months on end, something otherworldly starts to happen in your own body and starts to happen between people who are doing them.”
“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 about
The Pale Blue Dot, taken 30 years ago on February 14, 1990, by the Voyager 1 space probe
from 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles) away from
Earth.
