Can We Save Our Species From Ourselves?

Upon seeing an image of Earth taken from the edge of our solar system, Carl Sagan wrote:

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of particular interest. But for us, it’s different. 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 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…

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.

In 1990, at the request of Carl Sagan, , NASA instructed the Voyager I space probe to focus its camera back on Earth from a distance of 3.7 billion miles.

The image sent from the space probe was called the “Pale Blue Dot” and inspired Sagan’s book Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space.

Can we save our species from ourselves?

Yes.

And it starts with a simple change of perspective.

By: Gabe Berman

Gabe Berman is a native New Yorker who settled in South Florida after graduating from the University of Miami. An epiphany, a passion, and a trail of breadcrumbs led him out of Corporate America and into the career he was meant for. After eight years of writing columns for the Miami Herald, his book - Live Like A Fruit Fly - was published by HCI Books and subsequently endorsed by Deepak Chopra. His second book, The Complete B.S. Free and Totally Tested Writing Guide, helps artists find their voice and his latest work, Where Is God When Our Loved Ones Get Sick?, uncovers the answer to this haunting question.