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Please check out my latest video editing project. A reading from Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot with music and video footage added. Thanks!
Dr. Andrew Joseph Pegoda
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Video Transcript:
00:00
Look again at that dot.
00:03
That’s here. That’s home.
00:06
That’s us.
00:09
On it everyone you love, everyone you know,
00:12
everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was,
00:15
lived out their lives.
00:18
The aggregate of our joy
00:21
and suffering,
00:24
thousands of confident religions,
00:27
ideologies, and economic doctrines
00:30
every hunter and forager,
00:33
every hero
00:36
and coward,
00:39
every creator
00:42
and destroyer of civilization,
00:45
every king
00:48
and peasant,
00:51
every young couple in love,
00:54
every mother and father, hopeful child,
00:57
inventor and explorer,
01:00
every teacher of morals,
01:03
every corrupt politician,
01:06
every “superstar,”
01:09
every “supreme leader,”
01:12
every saint and sinner
01:15
in the history of our species
01:18
lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
01:21
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.
01:25
Think of the rivers of blood spilled
01:28
by all those generals and emperors so that,
01:31
in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
01:36
Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel
01:41
on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner,
01:45
how frequent their misunderstandings,
01:48
how eager they are to kill one another,
01:51
how fervent their hatreds.
01:54
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance,
01:57
the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe,
02:02
are challenged by this point of pale light.
02:05
Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark.
02:11
In our obscurity, in all this vastness,
02:14
there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
02:19
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life.
02:24
There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate.
02:29
Visit, yes. Settle, not yet.
02:33
Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
02:37
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience.
02:43
There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits
02:48
than this distant image of our tiny world.
02:53
To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another,
02:58
and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.
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Previously published on andrewpegoda.com
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Photo credit: Screen Shot from Video