Perspective

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...

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.
-Carl Sagan

As Voyager looked back toward Earth, as it left the solar system, glare in the optics enveloped the 'pale blue dot' of our planet in what appeared to be a sort of spotlight. But really, there is no spotlight. Just a tiny planet, revolving around an average star, in a typical galaxy. Home, for now, to us.

We may be overheating the planet, and our world may be headed for an ice age. The two aren't mutually exclusive. The plain fact is that we are a recently emergent species, and there is no guarantee how long we'll last. There are misanthropes who chuckle at the thought of humankind's demise, so the dolphins or snaildarters or Ewoks can rule the planet in peace and harmony. But not me. I suspect humans will outlive me by thousands, perhaps 10s of thousands of years. But probably not millions, and that's very likely the kind of time the Earth has in some form that will sustain life.

No one will be here to gloat nor mourn when the last of the pyramids is ground to dust, or when the last vestige of art or architecture crumbles. The death-cult of some treehuggers has them naively imagine themselves there to tell us all "I told you so" as civilization disappears. When the last ocean boils, or freezes solid, or is enveloped in the death-throes of our sun, the passage of this beautiful place will go unrecorded.

So live now. Dance on the pale blue dot while there is time. And fuck anybody who won't.