Carl Sagan - Who Speaks for Earth?

Our loyalties are to the species and the planet. We speak for Earth. Our obligation to survive and flourish is owed, not just to ourselves, but also to that Cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we sprang.

In our tenure on this planet we've accumulated dangerous evolutionary baggage, propensities for aggression and ritual, submission to leaders, hostility to outsiders, all of which puts our survival in some doubt. We've also acquired compassion for others, love for our children, A desire to learn from History and experience, and a great, soaring, passionate intelligence, the clear tools for our continued survival and prosperity. Which aspects of our nature will prevail, is uncertain, particularly when our visions and prospects are bound to one small part of the small Planet Earth.

But up there in the Cosmos, an inescapable perspective awaits. National boundaries are not evident when we view the Earth from space. Fanatic ethnic or religious or national identifications are a little difficult to support when we see our planet as a fragile, blue crescent, fading to become an inconspicuous point of light against the bastion and citadel of the stars.

How would we explain all this to a dispassionate extra-terrestrial observer? What account would we give of our stewardship of the planet Earth? We have heard the rationales offered by the superpowers, we know who speaks for the nations, but who speaks for the Human species?

Who speaks for Earth? From an extra-terrestrial perspective, our global civilization is clearly on the edge of failure, and the most important task it faces, preserving the lives and wellbeing of its citizens, and the future habitability of the planet. We've reached a point where there can be no more special interests or special cases.

Fundamental changes in society are sometimes labeled "impractical" or "contrary to human nature", as if there were only one human nature, but fundamental changes can clearly be made, we're surrounded by them. In the last two centuries, abject slavery, which was with us for thousands of years, has almost entirely been eliminated in a stirring worldwide revolution. Women, systematically mistreated for millennia, are gradually gaining the political and economic power traditionally denied to them, and some wars of aggression have recently been stopped or curtailed because of a revulsion felt by the people in the aggressor nations.

The old appeals to racial, sexual, and religious chauvinism, and to rabid nationalist fervor are beginning not to work. A new consciousness is developing which sees the Earth as a single organism, and recognizes that an organism at war with itself, is doomed. We are one planet.

And our small planet, at this moment, here we face a critical branch point in history. What we do with our world right now, will propagate down through the centuries and powerfully affect the destiny of our descendants. It is well within our power to destroy our civilization and perhaps our species as well.

If we capitulate to superstition, or greed, or stupidity, we can plunge our world into a darkness deeper than the time between the collapse of classical civilization and the Italian Renaissance. But, we are also capable of using our compassion and our intelligence, our technology and our wealth, to make abundant and meaningful life for every inhabitant of this planet, to enhance enormously our understanding of the Universe, and to carry us to the stars.