"Fundamental changes in society are sometimes labeled impractical or contrary to human nature, as if nuclear war were practical or as if there were only one human nature. The old appeals to racial, sexual, and religious chauvinism, to rabid nationalist fervor, are beginning not to work. A new consciousness is developing which sees the Earth as a single organism, and recognizes that an organism at war with itself is doomed; we are one planet. We, who cannot even put our own planetary home in order, riven with rivalries and hatreds, are we to venture out into space? By the time we are ready to settle even the nearest other planetary systems, we will have changed. The simple passage of so many generations will have changed us. Necessity will have changed us. We are an adaptable species. It will not be we who reach Alpha Centauri and the other nearby stars; it will be a species very like us but with more of our strengths and fewer of our weaknesses; More confident, far seeing, capable and prudent. For all our failing, despite our limitations and fallibilities, we humans are capable of greatness. What new wonders undreamt of in our time will we have wrought in an other generation, and an other.
How far will have our nomadic species have wondered by the end of the next century, and the next millennia. Our remote descendants, safely arrayed on many worlds in the solar system and beyond, will be unified; by their common heritage, by their regard for their home planet, and by the knowledge that whatever other life may be, the only humans in all the universe come from Earth. They will gaze up and strain to find the blue dot in their skies. They will marvel at how vulnerable the repository of all out potential once was, how perilous our infancy, how humble our beginnings.
How many rivers we had to cross before we found
our way."
- Carl Sagan’s The Pale Blue Dot
