“Consider again that dot. 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 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. 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.
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, 《Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space》，1994）
謝謝牧人兄的轉貼。Carl Sagan 是天文學家，宇宙學家，也是一位傑出的科普作家，他說過的最最有名的一句話在霍金的新作The Grand Design中被引用：The cosmos is also within us, We're made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself."。Carl Sagan解說並與他人合作寫的電視系列Cosmos: A Personal Voyage是美國公共電視台收視最高的系列節目。他的“接班人” Neil deGrasse Tyson也很厲害，其解說的系列節目Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey也非常棒，散文詩一般優美的語言，而且非常富有激情，觀後感覺心靈得到了一些淨化和提升。CCTV的這幫人就是赤腳奔也趕不上。我每次去Bruce半島，晚上一定會去參加Bayside Astronomy Program的活動，藉助他們的天文望遠鏡看星星，很享受。月球上的坑坑窪窪都看得非常真切。土星非常大而且亮，而且外面還有一些光環。再坐下來聽他們講解一些天文常識，非常有趣。
。
