The Center Of All Things

This is taken from a video that The Thinking Atheist made on Youtube called "The center of all things", which is an homage to Carl Sagan's "Pale Blue Dot," this video explores humankind's place in the cosmos:

Imagine.

Imagine what it was like for those who came before us, at the dawn of humankind.

When the earth was flat, when the moon and sun where our mother and father, and when the stars where only pinholes in the curtain in the sky.



When we drew our history with primitive pictures, when we fashioned our shelters inside the the cold rock of the landscape.



When a long life was 30 years...

When everything we saw, was a sign... When a flash from the sky meant that God was angry, when the earth shook, the spirits where displeased. The flood waters came, and we begged for forgiveness, the volcano erupted, and we appeased it with sacrifices.



We suffered sickness and disease, and we called it a curse. When loved ones perished, and we called it judgement.



Everything was beyond our understanding... Mysterious, strange, wondrous, terrifying, unknown...



Yet, somehow we believed that we were the center of all things...

And then, we began to see our own world with new eyes. The moon was a place we would one day visit, and leave our footprints in the dust. The sun was a brilliant cascade of helium and hydrogen. A star... A single solitary star, among billions of other stars, inside a single galaxy, alongside hundreds of billions of other galaxies, in a universe born billions of years before us...



The tempests above us, the fire beneath us... They became explainable, measurable, often foreseeable.



Our crude illustrations gave way to rich expressions of picture and verse, that ignited the imagination.



We build our shelters from wood, mortar, glass, and steel.



We discovered living worlds beyond the naked eye, and we inhabited that world to understand and begin to conquer sickness and disease. We began to unlock the code of our very being and discover the bond between all living things.



We celebrated long lives of over a hundred years.



Our age is a new age of enlightenment. At this very moment, humankind is beginning to grow beyond the childish figures of its infancy. To refuse to be satisfied with unanswered questions. To acknowledge the universe a universe, much grander and more wonderful than the superstitions of our ancestors would ever allow. And to understand that even though we occupy a tiny planet inside a vast universe, we are still part of it. We are growing, we are learning, we are achieving, we are evolving. To finally understand that we are not the center of all things.

If we long for our planet to be important, there is something we can do about it. We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers. - Carl Sagan