Onward | Teen Ink

Onward

July 13, 2014
By Valor GOLD, Hawthorne, California
Valor GOLD, Hawthorne, California
15 articles 0 photos 2 comments

Favorite Quote:
&ldquo;Look again at that dot. That&#039;s here. That&#039;s home. That&#039;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 &quot;superstar,&quot; every &quot;supreme leader,&quot; every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.<br /> <br /> 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.<br /> <br /> 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.<br /> <br /> 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.<br /> <br /> 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&#039;ve ever known.&rdquo; <br /> ― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space


At first all the human race ever saw was the green plants and the clouds
then they invented the airplane they not only saw the clouds but went through them
then they invented the Rocket they soared so high that they escaped the atmosphere
they saw earth in its entirety they saw the continents of earth the lakes the oceans the cities
they set their eyes on the stars that day they went to the moon and set eyes upon a blue marble in its entirety they saw how tiny this this world of theirs was they saw the great blue marble
they finally set off for the planets now the place they call home will now only be a tiny blue dot that they stare at in the sky and see thats where their humble beginnings lead to something far greater.


The author's comments:
This piece uses references to carl Sagan and is inspired by the works of Richard Feynman

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