We are all human beings trying to find our place in this world. When we put in perspective how tiny our planet is compared to the vastness of space and how our lives are literally a blink in the timeline of our universe we should be striving for and teaching everyone to be compassionate towards each other.
We should continue to investigate the universe and our place in it through scientific inquiry.
We should be raising curious kids that ask questions, think critically, and seek scientific knowledge and evidence to reach reasonable conclusions instead of leaning on inaccurate and biased religious testaments.
We should be indoctrinating kids with experiences that can give them life lessons that can help educate them, instead of a belief system we just happen to geographically fall into.
We should be teaching our children the importance of education, and not just in the school sense, but also in life. And to be lifelong learners.
Read lots of books, not just one
Get outside
Be nice
Look at the stars
If we can do this, we can begin the process of eliminating the things holding civilization back, the world doesn’t have the time for racism, religion, and hate.
I suggest listening to the following excerpt from Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot, but if you don’t, at least read it:
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
Dave
Oregon
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