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Clifford Dimond's avatar

Along the same lines as your thoughts, Carl Sagan looked at the big picture about our responsibility to our only home: Earth. His perspective was looking at tiny, barely discernible image of Earth taken from the Voyager spacecraft millions of miles away.

“ 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 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. 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. 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, 1994

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Carolina Martina's avatar

Dean, As you know, I am one of the Childless Adults who with Tiko chose to be Childless. The child investment in the future is priceless, yes. To think about: Raising "good kids", what meaning does that actually have? As cultures continue to collide, with lethal force, the who, what, when, where comes into the equation and we suddenly find ourselves in perpetuity, in a war culture. What compass shall we choose? I do believe it is the heart, and that one speck in the moment, one beat of the heart can be miraculous. I think that while living to live into the future my greatest choice is to encourage others to stop fighting. Yet, to gain a hold, a stand, freedom, peace of mind, we are encouraged to fight. This saddens me and continues to feed the war metaphor. Coming into the world, some born are very lucky to have had caregivers that modelled generosity, gentleness, strength, courage, safety, and above all loving and being loved. Before the age of five, we wee ones are but a tapestry woven of emotional stitching . There is no articulation for this. Foundations for life are forming this tapestry. Moving forward, the weaving, unbeknownest, directs and shapes becoming human. Automatic Pilot is scary. Especially if unaware it's Automatic Pilot. There's no doubt in my mind that whatever path is being walked, one must do a reality check as often as needed to sense whether it is the moment to find a new path. What We Owe The Future, by the Scottish philosopher and ethicist William MacAskill (Basic Books, 2022), maybe the library will have it? Somehow honoring culture, the culture of interdependence seems a fair way to approach the future. Let love be what we do best.

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