Pale blue dot

Det är en bra idé att ibland påminna sig själv att pengar verkligen inte är allt. Tillvaron är oerhört mycket större än så. Barn, tyskt öl, snö som smälter bort... det finns mycket att glädja sig åt...

Det finns en lite besvärande ensidighet hos många investerare, Buffett är verkligen inget undantag, där tävlan att samla på sig pengar går ut över allt annat. Världens bäste fondförvaltare, Peter Lynch, är, eller snarare blev till sist, ett undantag då han sent omsider såg ljuset efter att ha arbetat sig igenom sina tre döttrars hela uppväxt. Han gick i pension innan han hade fyllt femtio med motiveringen "Few people on their deathbed regret that they didn't spend more time at the office".

Carl Sagan bad de ansvariga för rymdsonden Voyager 1 att vända kameran mot Jorden på det största avstånd som den har fotograferats i hopp om att skapa ett fotografi som kunde hjälpa människor att få lite distans till det som de upplever som viktigt. Resultatet blev denna bild där Jorden hänger som ett dammkorn fångat i en solstråle.

Uppenbarligen filosofiskt lagd skrev han följande tänkvärda anförande till presentationen av bilden:

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.