.
"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."
(Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot-- imaging from Voyager 1)
The Earth is like a death star, careening thru space, looping around and
around the Sun many times over and again: a floating grave yard whose soil
is filled with the dead from many centuries stretching back to Abel: the first
of its passengers to return to the dust from whence they came.
• Eccl 7:2 . . It is better to spend your time at funerals than at festivals. For
you are going to die, and you should think about it while there is still time.
_