Our little blue planet, a speck of dust in the vast universe, can create miracles without end. Every one of us, every living being, is a product of the Big Bang and shares the same ingredients in our bodies. Every person on this little blue ball, every person who has ever existed, every saint and sinner in history, has spent his entire life on the same earth.
Thanks to this unparalleled documentary, I was able to break free from the drudgery of my daily life and jump into outer space to contemplate the entire universe. Whenever I'm down or lost, I'll think of this documentary that saved my mind, and I'm grateful for all.
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, we 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. 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.
How did we, tiny creatures living on that speck of dust, ever manage to figure out how to send spacecraft out among the stars of the Milky Way?
Only a few centuries ago, a mere second of cosmic time, we knew nothing of where or when we were. Oblivious to the rest of the cosmos, we inhabited a kind of prison -- a tiny universe bounded by a nutshell. How did we escape from the prison? It was the work of generations of searchers who took five simple rules to heart:
Question authority - No idea is true just because someone says so, including me. Think for yourself.
Question yourself - Don't believe anything just because you want to. Believing something doesn't make it so.
Test ideas by the evidence gained from observation and experiment - If a favorite idea fails a well-designed test, it's wrong! Get over it.
Follow the evidence, wherever it leads - If you have no evidence, reserve judgment. And perhaps the most important rule of all...
Remember, you could be wrong - Even the best scientists have been wrong about some things. Newton, Einstein, and every other great scientist in history, they all made mistakes. Of course they did -- they were human. Science is a way to keep from fooling ourselves... and each other.
Have scientists known sin? Of course. We have misused science, just as we have every other tool at our disposal, and that's why we can't afford to leave it in the hands of a powerful few. The more science belongs to all of us, the less likely it is to be misused.
View more about Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey reviews
