“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）
谢谢牧人兄的转贴。Carl Sagan 是天文学家，宇宙学家，也是一位杰出的科普作家，他说过的最最有名的一句话在霍金的新作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解说并与他人合作写的电视系列Cosmos: A Personal Voyage是美国公共电视台收视最高的系列节目。他的“接班人” Neil deGrasse Tyson也很厉害，其解说的系列节目Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey也非常棒，散文诗一般优美的语言，而且非常富有激情，观后感觉心灵得到了一些净化和提升。CCTV的这帮人就是赤脚奔也赶不上。我每次去Bruce半岛，晚上一定会去参加Bayside Astronomy Program的活动，借助他们的天文望远镜看星星，很享受。月球上的坑坑洼洼都看得非常真切。土星非常大而且亮，而且外面还有一些光环。再坐下来听他们讲解一些天文常识，非常有趣。
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