The Cosmos [universe] extends, for all practical purposes, forever … Our remote descendants, safely arrayed on many worlds through the Solar System and beyond … will gaze up and strain to find the blue dot [earth] in their skies. They will love it no less for its obscurity and fragility. They will marvel at how vulnerable the repository of all our potential once was, how perilous our infancy, how humble our beginnings, how many rivers we had to cross before we found our way.
Pale Blue Dot
A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science, might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe tapped by the conventional faiths. Sooner or later, such a religion will emerge.
Pale Blue Dot, p. 77
One of science’s alleged crimes is revealing that our favorite, most reassuring stories about our place in the universe and how we came to be are delusional. Instead what science reveals is a universe much older and much vaster than the tidy, anthropomorphic proscenium of our ancestors. We have found from modern astronomy that we live on a tiny hunk of rock and metal third from the sun, that circles a humdrum star in the obscure outskirts of an ordinary galaxy, which contains some four hundred billion other stars, which is one of about a hundred billion other galaxies that make up the universe, and according to some current views, a universe that is one among an immense number, perhaps an infinite number, of other universes. In this perspective the idea that our planet is at the center of the universe, much less that human purpose is central to the existence of the universe, is pathetic.
last public address given in the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, New York City