from web site
Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everybody you love, everybody you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our happiness and suffering, thousands of confident religious beliefs, ideologies, and financial teachings, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every developer and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, enthusiastic kid, inventor and explorer, every instructor of morals, every corrupt politician, every 'super star,' every 'supreme leader,' every saint and sinner in the history of our types lived there on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

Think about the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and victory they might end up being the short-term masters of a portion of a dot. Think of the limitless ruthlessness visited by the residents of one corner of this pixel on the hardly distinguishable occupants of some other corner.
Our posturings, our pictured self-importance, the delusion that we have some fortunate position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Carl Sagan, in 1980. Our planet is a lonely speck in the excellent enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity in all this vastness there is no hint that help will originate from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

There is no place else, at least in the near future, to which our types might move. Go to, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand. It has actually been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is possibly no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our small world.