NO PLANET B

From the website An Inconvenient Truth. No matter what we do, the planet will survive. In time it will heal itself. Of course if we manage to fuck things up badly enough, neither we or any of our descendants will be around to see it. Part of me is almost glad that Carl Sagan isn't around to see that too many of us not only didn't listen, we're even more of a train wreck waiting to happen than we were in the nineties. On the other hand...he was beginning to sound pretty cranky by the time he wrote this book. 

“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 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. 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.

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 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.”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

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