Zen Pencils by Gavin Aung Than for March 24, 2025

Transcript:

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. POLAND CZECHOSLOVAKIA AUSTRIA 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, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. PUBLIC LIBRARY SILENCE in the LIBRARY LIBRARIAN The UNIVERSE NON-FICTION SPACE, SCIENCE GALAXIES MILKY WAY Our planet is a lonely speck in the 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 WAR OF THE WORLDS H.G. WELLS 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. JOHN CARTER OF MARS by EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS Visit, yes… Settle, not yet. MARS and its canals PERCIVAL LOWELL 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. ROOFTOP EXIT And to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot… …the only home we’ve ever known. CARL SAGAN