The harsh truth of life is that except for a few people:
You don’t matter.
The world doesn’t really care about you.
You are a nobody.
It is always time to get over your feeling of you being important, you being pivot to anything, you being a winner or you being an achiever.
And one more thing, your problems don’t matter.
Nobody cares.
Life goes on.
Always has. Always will.
With you. Without you.
Here’s the excerpt from Sagan’s book Pale Blue Dot.
It was inspired by an image of the earth taken, at Sagan’s suggestion, by Voyager 1 on February 14, 1990.
Caught in the center of scattered light rays (a result of taking the picture so close to the Sun, from a distance of more than 6 billion kilometers from the earth), Earth appears as a tiny point of light, a crescent only 0.12 pixel in size.
Whoever you’re, whatsoever you’ve achieved, get ready to be humbled by this harsh truth, beautifully written by Carl Sagan.
Look again at 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 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 a 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.
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