Take a look. It’s a PALE BLUE DOT. That's us. That's home. That's where we are.

On it, everybody you love, everybody you know, everybody you’ve ever heard of, lived out their days there. The aggregates of all our joy and suffering, thousands of confident ideologies, religions, economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every revered teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every uncorrupt politician, too, every "superstar", every "supreme leader", every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there. 

The Earth is a very small stage in a great cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors, presidents and prime ministers, party leaders, so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of the corner of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one part of the dot, on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of another part of the dot – 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, seem to me, 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 there is anyone who will come and save us from ourselves. That will happen only if WE do it.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling experience, and I would add, character-building. To me, this is one of many demonstrations, through astronomy, of the folly of human conceits.

To me, this picture 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.

節(jié)選自卡爾·薩根在康奈爾大學(xué)的演講。