Wednesday, November 12, 2003
Where is Your Home?
My home is a floating speck of dust. If you concentrate closely on this photograph, you’ll see it roughly in the center of a golden beam of light—just a pale blue dot. I live on that dot.
I am obviously very small… smaller than you might think. Small enough, if you can believe it, that billions of creatures just like me all live here on this same little dot—with plenty of space left over!
All this extra space is just crawling with other kinds of life, too; and most of them even smaller than we are! In fact, life seems to appear everywhere here. Every moment, we breathe in hundreds of life forms even smaller to us than this dot is to you.
But the problem is that even though my home is so small, it seems really big to most of my fellow creatures. They fight all the time over who controls different parts of this place… and all this fighting means that we don’t share things. Hundreds of millions of us have to go hungry even though there’s plenty of food, or get sick even though there’s plenty of medicine.
Some say that much of this little dot is going to be more or less unusable in just a few of our short life-spans. They point out, quite rightly, that we’re all stuck here. Together. And the thought of that just terrifies them.
But to me, it’s just that terror which causes all these problems. Our dot is not a cage, it’s a home, and the people who live here are a family. If more of us could see this picture of our home like you do, as a small point of light, perhaps more of us would start to think of it as just one place—one home, each and every pixel of it belonging to all of us at once.
It is our tiny, priceless jewel in the mist.
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