Opening AYELE NUBIAN WARRIOR ACTIVITY TABLET #1

Just a little instructional video for AYELE NUBIAN WARRIOR COLORING & ACTIVITY TABLET #1 to get your Coloring and Activity Party STARTED!

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• "Sinners" is a cinematic masterpiece that effortlessly blends humor, emotion, and music into an unforgettable experience. From start to finish, the film captivates with its superb acting and engaging performances. The plot is a rollercoaster of unexpected twists and turns, keeping the audience on their toes and eagerly anticipating what comes next. The soundtrack is nothing short of amazing, perfectly complementing the film's emotional highs and lows. Both the director and actors have done a phenomenal job in bringing this story to life. It's not often that a film makes you want to laugh, cry, rejoice and dance in one sitting. I wholeheartedly recommend watching "Sinners" for yourself to witness its brilliance firsthand.

I am extremely honored that our blog Black Science Fiction Society Blog - https://blacksciencefictionsociety.com/profiles/blogshas been selected as one of the Top 20 African American Book Blogs on the web. Currently we are number eight!

https://bloggers.feedspot.com/african_american_book_blogs/ This is the most comprehensive list of Top 20 African American Book Blogs on the internet and I'm honored to be a part of this! 1000 thanks for your gracious support! It is sincerely appreciated.

THE ADIGUN OGUNSANWO Comic Strip #28

of The Inner Space Adventure in FULL COLOR 

has now hit the Manga newsstand at abyssiniamedia.net. ENJOY!

AMG®'s PREMIER AFRO FUTURIST TITLE 


Chapters 26 & 27 of THE ADIGUN OGUNSANWO

Manga Comic Strip has just DROPPED....

http://abyssiniamedia.net/?page_id=359

Masaki Kashiwara—Abel Prize Laureate 2025. Peter Badge/Typos1/The Abel Prize

Topics: Abel Prize, Mathematics, Modern Physics, Research

Masaki Kashiwara, this year’s Abel Prize winner, co-founded a new field of mathematics called algebraic analysis.

One of the landmarks of Kyoto, the home of mathematician Masaki Kashiwara, is the Kamo River. At certain points, there are stepping stones that allow residents to cross the river away from the bridges. If you take a closer look at these stones, you can see how the water forms swirls and small eddies around them. Describing this flow of a liquid is not easy. You have to solve complicated equations that have been known for centuries but still pose many mysteries today: Do the equations always have a solution? How can they be calculated? And what properties do they have? It seems that mathematicians have reached a limit with the tools of their trade. To make progress, a new toolbox is needed. The Japanese mathematician Masaki Kashiwara developed such a toolbox for similarly difficult questions in the 1970s.

Kashiwara introduced proven methods from algebra into analysis—the theory underlying calculus that explores functions, limits, and other concepts—and, together with his colleagues, founded an entirely new branch of mathematics: algebraic analysis. This led to significant advances in various fields. For example, Kashiwara succeeded in solving one of the problems posed by mathematician David Hilbert in the early 20th century and developed new techniques that are now used in modern physics.

Kashiwara “has proved astonishing theorems with methods no one had imagined. He has been a true mathematical visionary,” read a recent press release from the Norwegian Academy of Sciences and Letters, which honored him with this year’s Abel Prize—one of the highest honors in mathematics.

Kashiwara was born near Tokyo in 1947. He discovered his passion for mathematics at an early age through traditional Japanese puzzles known as tsurukamezan. These puzzles involve correctly calculating the number of cranes and turtles: Suppose x heads and y legs are visible. How many cranes and turtles are there? Kashiwara’s parents didn’t have much exposure to the abstract subject, but the young Masaki enjoyed solving this problem using algebraic methods.

Abel Prize Goes to Pioneer Whose ‘Math Toolbox’ Can Be Used to Describe the Natural World, Manon Bischoff, Gary Stix (Editor), Scientific American

The Digital AYELE NUBIAN WARRIOR Coloring & Activity Tablet #1 - Batoda

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Just a little instructional video for

AFRICANS OF ANTIQUITY -  A Digital Coloring Book

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I woke up this morning to find out that
AYELE NUBIAN WARRIOR #3 has been NOMINATED for the
East Coast Black Age of Comics Convention (ECBACC)
Glyph Award for BEST COMIC STRIP OR WEBCOMIC for 2025.

Yo STIFF competition this season and not just in the category I am nominated for.
Best of Care to everyone nominated this year.
VOTE For ME Here:
https://www.ecbacc.com/gca-fan-award-voting.html

Then CHECK OUT my competition>>>

https://www.ecbacc.com/gcanominees2025.html

Abyssinia Media Group®

is taking applications for Colorist/Moodologist for their title THE CONQUERING LION.
Follow the link below, fill out and submit your application.
THANKS for your love and patronage.

Applications found at the link below:

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(POSTER ABOVE ILLUSTRATED BY CJ JUZANG, COLORED BY DAMALI BEATTY)

MARCH MADNESS BRINGS

AMG® DIGITAL BOOK SALE!

Follow the link below and get the DIGITAL DOWNLOAD of AYELE NUBIAN WARRIOR #2 Comic Book for
the Discounted price of $1.50 and immediately download to your Computer, Phone or favorite Digital
Device. SALE Ends MARCH 31, 2025

Continuing the Fantasy Sword and Soul DIGITAL Comic book. Woman Warrior NJERI CHASIKU and twin
bodyguards MWANDO and NJONDO advance against the city-state of MAHOMA with a large force of TAJI
WARLORDS. Meanwhile, the hunt for BABU KARUME is continued by warrior wizard KAMBUI-BOMANI.
He has alot in his cape.

ENJOY!

Written and illustrated By CJ JUZANG
Lettering by AMG® FONTCRAFTERZ
Edited by JAY R. SCOTT

https://amgmarket.etsy.com/listing/931115478

A branching blood vessel network fabricated using the ESCAPE process to form complex tissues. This image shows the cell nuclei color-coded based on height.

Credit: Subramanian Sundaram, Boston University and Wyss Institute, Harvard University

Topics: 3D Printing, Additive Manufacturing, Biology, Tissue Engineering

The manufacturing technique known as 3D printing, now being used everywhere, from aircraft manufacturers to public libraries, has never been more affordable or accessible. Biomedical engineering has particularly benefited from 3D printing as prosthetic devices can be produced and tested more rapidly than ever before. However, 3D printing still faces challenges when printing living tissues, partly due to their complexity and fragility.

Now, with support from the U.S. National Science Foundation, a research team at Boston University (BU) and the Wyss Institute at Harvard University has pioneered the use of gallium, a metal that can be molded at room temperature, to create tissue structures in various shapes and sizes.

This innovative approach to fabrication, engineered sacrificial capillary pumps for evacuation (ESCAPE), was highlighted in a recent study published in Nature, where the team used gallium casts to mold biomaterials. The scaffolds left behind by these casts are then filled with cells cultured to form tissue structures. Vascular structures were some of the first produced using ESCAPE, particularly because of the challenges faced due to blood vessel complexity. Few techniques exist to build large (millimeter-scale) and small (micrometer-scale) structures in scaffolds made of natural materials, making this multiscale fabrication capability a novel approach.

"ESCAPE can be used on several tissue architectures, but we started with vascular forms because blood vessel networks feature many different length scales," said Christopher Chen, director of BU's Biological Design Center and senior author on the study. Chen is also the deputy director of CELL-MET, an NSF Engineering Research Center at BU funded by a $34 million award from NSF, and co-principal investigator on the award for the NSF Science and Technology Center for Engineering MechanoBiology at the University of Pennsylvania. "Our blood vessel demonstrations include trees with many branches, including dead ends and portions that experience fluid flow. This allows us to model a range of healthy structures as well as diseased abnormalities."

Biofabricating human tissues enhanced through use of gallium, National Science Foundation

MARCH MADNESS BRINGS

AMG® DIGITAL BOOK SALE!

Follow the link below and get the
DIGITAL DOWNLOAD of AYELE NUBIAN WARRIOR #3 Comic Book
for the Discounted price of $1.50 and immediately download
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Continuing the Fantasy Sword and Soul Comic book. GIZA MGANGA has ruled for 4,000 seasons... nothing escapes his reach. Not even BABU KARUME, or AYELE NUBIAN WARRIOR. In MAHOMA, interruptions of a religious ceremony by TAJI WARLORDS begin to cause major problems within the MAHOMAN community.

ENJOY!

Written and illustrated By CJ JUZANG

Lettering by AMG® FONTCRAFTERZ

Edited by JAY R. SCOTT

https://amgmarket.etsy.com/listing/1665526216

In 2012 the 1895 pastel-on-cardboard version fetched almost $120 million (£75 million) at Sotheby’s in New York (Credit: The Scream 1895/Edvard Munch)

Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, Civilization, Democracy, Existentialism, Fascism

An entry in Munch’s diary, dated 22 January 1892, recorded the inspiration for The Scream: “I was walking along the road with two friends – the sun went down – I felt a gust of melancholy – suddenly the sky turned a bloody red. I stopped, leaned against the railing, tired to death – as the flaming skies hung like blood and sword over the blue-black fjord and the city – my friends went on – I stood there trembling with anxiety – and I felt a vast infinite scream through nature.” -- What is the meaning of The Scream? Alastair Sooke, BBC, 3 March 2016

If you feel exhaustion from the weeks of nonsense, let me give you some perspective.

In my family, I've experienced two members of my family who had mental health issues. Both were older than me, so by age and station I wanted to afford them respect. One in particular had substance abuse issues. The other was my direct caretaker, as I was too young to have a key to our home. This person did the most bizarre things, like eating chips all day on a couch that attracted mice, the ones I could see scurrying under the couch. Asking why they would do that would engender a defensive argument where no cogent points of logic were used, just emotion, irrationality, and hutzpah. My substance abuse relative was my father's nephew, who couldn't live on his own, so when he got back from Vietnam, he retired to his old bedroom and abused alcohol. When he needed money to get more liquor, he would attack my aunt, and my father often had to intervene.

When you deal with individuals who have mental health issues, they exhaust you because you're constantly trying to get to a modicum of normalcy. You exhaust a considerable amount of brain power trying to come up with the argument, the "zinger" that will put the matter to rest, that will "win" an argument with a sociopath. You'd have better luck playing chess with Hannibal Lecter, hoping not to be in his next pâté.

It always comes to a head.

My cousin decided it was a great idea to break a beer bottle over my father's head. My cousin had the sudden, painful reminder (the hard way) that Pop was ranked Middle Weight Golden Gloves in the United States Navy in World War Two. It wasn't pretty.

My caretaker, in an argument with my mom and me, found a wooden mallet in an old toy tool chest I had and tried to hit my mother! I was big enough to put her in a "full Nelson" like I saw on the National Wrestling Federation. My caretaker was fired, and put on a bus to relatives in Washington. My mother gave me a key with the pronouncement "You're GROWN!" The next day, I opened the house to peaceful, and studious solitude.

Everything in this insanity will come to a head. Reality, whether beer bottle, mallet, new pandemic, war, recession, or depression, will have to be confronted. Gaslighting is the tool of an abuser, but it has zero effects on financial markets, or physics.

"Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced." -- James Baldwin

It will be exhausting, like the storm that hit North Carolina Wednesday: a small tornado touched down in Winston-Salem, there was a watch in Greensboro, and torrential rain where I was sitting in Durham. My three friends and I decided to stay inside and have lunch in the cafeteria. It was a wise choice. After the storms: sunlight and clear skies. As the BBC article eludes in bold and quotes, "We all scream." In confronting insanity, this is normal.

There will be a price for confrontation, and always a prize for confrontation.

Push to sunlight, clear skies past the storm, and off-year elections and midterms.

That is the meaning of "The Scream." We all scream, before sunlight, and clearer skies.

Topics: Materials Science, Nanomaterials, Phonons, Quantum Computers, Quantum Mechanics, Superconductors

Argonne researchers have developed a cutting-edge technique to study atomic vibrations near material interfaces, opening doors to new quantum applications in computing and sensing.

Scientists are racing to develop new materials for quantum technologies in computing and sensing for ultraprecise measurements. For these future technologies to transition from the laboratory to real-world applications, a much deeper understanding is needed of the behavior near surfaces, especially those at interfaces between materials. 

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory have unveiled a new technique that could help advance the development of quantum technology. Their innovation, surface-sensitive spintronic terahertz spectroscopy (SSTS), provides an unprecedented look at how quantum materials behave at interfaces.

“This technique allows us to study surface phonons — the collective vibrations of atoms at a material’s surface or interface between materials,” said Zhaodong Chu, a postdoctoral researcher at Argonne and first author of the study. ​“Our findings reveal striking differences between surface phonons and those in the bulk material, opening new avenues for research and applications.”

In materials such as crystals, atoms form repeating patterns called lattices, which can vibrate in waves known as phonons. While much is understood about phonons in the bulk material, little is known about surface phonons — those occurring within nanometers of an interface. The team’s research reveals that surface phonons behave differently, enabling unique quantum behaviors such as interfacial superconductivity.

New nanoscale technique unlocks quantum material secrets, Joseph E. Harmon, Argonne National Laboratories

The "woolly mouse" was developed by Colossal Biosciences by editing genes to give the mouse a bushier, thicker coat, akin to that of the extinct woolly mammoth. Colossal

Topics: Biology, Biotechnology, Research

Note: I had a pet hamster named "Woolly," that looked remarkably like this one. I'm sure cloning wasn't at this point decades ago. He sadly only lasted a little over a year.

The biotech company Colossal Biosciences has long aspired to bring back the extinct woolly mammoth, which roamed the Northern Hemisphere thousands of years ago, during the last ice age. But for now, as a step along the way, the company has come up with something decidedly less mammoth: meet the woolly mouse.

On Tuesday Colossal announced this lab-born animal, which features shaggy, mammothlike fur and has cold-adapted traits such as the way in which it stores and burns fat. Researchers retrieved and sequenced ancient mammoth DNA from preserved skin, bone and hair to learn which genes controlled traits such as coat color and cold tolerance. They altered the corresponding genes in lab mice and made other alterations in the rodents’ genome.

What was the purpose of this feat of genetic engineering? Colossal’s pitch is that, with biodiversity going the way of the dodo (which the company also hopes to resurrect), saving existing species will require tweaking their DNA to make them more resilient. The researchers at the company also claim that bringing back extinct species can help the environment. For example, they say mammoths can help fight climate change by tamping down Arctic permafrost, reducing how much of it is thawing and releasing methane into the atmosphere. Company co-founder and CEO Ben Lamm puts the approach in startling terms: “Why leave nature to chance?” In pursuit of such “de-extinction” goals, Colossal has raised hundreds of millions of dollars from celebrities to the CIA.

Company Seeking to Resurrect the Woolly Mammoth Creates a 'Woolly Mouse', Adam Popescu, Andrea Thompson, Scientific American

Climeworks’ Mammoth plant in Iceland, which began operations in May 2024. The plant removes carbon dioxide with direct air capture — one of the methods examined in APS’ latest report.

Topics: Applied Physics, Climate Change, Global Warming, Green Tech

Anthropologists believe our ancestors first used fire as a tool nearly two million years ago. Eventually, fire became a necessity for cooking and warmth. Then, 4,000 years ago, dwellers in modern-day northern China discovered a black rock that burned better than wood: coal.

Today, we mine and consume an estimated 8.8 billion metric tons (tons) of coal every year, among other fossil fuels, releasing into Earth’s atmosphere billions of tons of carbon that had been locked away in Earth’s crust for hundreds of millions of years. That carbon dioxide, we now know, is blanketing our planet — trapping heat, supercharging hurricanes and heat waves, and melting vast expanses of sea ice and glaciers.

As countries race to drive their annual greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050, some are contemplating a different question: What can we do about the 1.5 trillion tons of carbon dioxide we’ve already added to our atmosphere?

On Jan. 27, APS released a new report, “Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Removal: A Physical Science Perspective,” that aims to answer this question. The four authors of the report — which was commissioned by the APS Panel on Public Affairs — are Washington Taylor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Jonathan Wurtele of the University of California, Berkeley, APS Past President Bob Rosner of the University of Chicago, and APS President-elect Brad Marston of Brown University.

The report summarizes the current state of available carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies and outlines recommendations for policymakers. Above all, the report emphasizes that in most cases, cutting current carbon emissions is easier and less costly than large-scale, engineered carbon dioxide removal efforts may ever be.

The daunting physics of carbon removal, American Physical Society, Liz Boatman

The Origins of Black History Month: Carter G. Woodson’s Act to Remember, State Senator Lena Taylor, Feb 11, 2019

Topics: African Americans, Black History Month, Carl Sagan, Carter G. Woodson, Democracy, Diversity in Science, Existentialism, Women in Science

“If you can control a man's thinking you do not have to worry about his action. When you determine what a man shall think, you do not have to concern yourself about what he will do. If you make a man feel that he is inferior, you do not have to compel him to accept an inferior status, for he will seek it himself. If you make a man think that he is justly an outcast, you do not have to order him to the back door. He will go without being told; and if there is no back door, his very nature will demand one.”
― Carter G. Woodson, The Mis-Education of the Negro

A complimentary quote:

Years later, I thought about this when I left Nigeria to go to university in the United States. I was 19. My American roommate was shocked by me. She asked where I had learned to speak English so well, and was confused when I said that Nigeria happened to have English as its official language. She asked if she could listen to what she called my “tribal music,” and was consequently very disappointed when I produced my tape of Mariah Carey. She assumed that I did not know how to use a stove.

What struck me was this: She had felt sorry for me even before she saw me. Her default position toward me, as an African, was a kind of patronizing, well-meaning pity. My roommate had a single story of Africa: a single story of catastrophe. In this single story, there was no possibility of Africans being similar to her in any way, no possibility of feelings more complex than pity, and no possibility of a connection as human equals.

So, after I had spent some years in the U.S. as an African, I began to understand my roommate’s response to me. If I had not grown up in Nigeria, and if all I knew about Africa were from popular images, I too would think that Africa was a place of beautiful landscapes, beautiful animals, and incomprehensible people, fighting senseless wars, dying of poverty and AIDS, unable to speak for themselves and waiting to be saved by a kind, white foreigner. I would see Africans in the same way that I, as a child, had seen Fide’s family.

This single story of Africa ultimately comes, I think, from Western literature. Now, here is a quote from the writing of a London merchant called John Lok, who sailed to West Africa in 1561 and kept a fascinating account of his voyage. After referring to the black Africans as “beasts who have no houses,” he writes, “They are also people without heads, having their mouth and eyes in their breasts.”

“The Danger of a Single Story,” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Nigerian author

Dr. Woodson was a historian and founded Negro History Week which became what we now celebrate as Black or African American History Month, and the subsequent clone celebrations: "Imitation is the best form of flattery." I offer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie as a compliment to the statement that I am about to make:

In oppressive systems, History Months are not designed to appease the oppressors.

Understand Dr. Woodson wrote The Mis-Education of the Negro five years before the British Play Gas Light, followed by the 1944 film Gaslight.

Gaslighting, an elaborate and insidious technique of deception and psychological manipulation, is usually practiced by a single deceiver, or “gaslighter,” on a single victim over an extended period. Its effect is to gradually undermine the victims’ confidence in their own ability to distinguish truth from falsehood, right from wrong, or reality from appearance, thereby rendering them pathologically dependent on the gaslighters in their thinking or feelings.

As part of the process, the victims’ self-esteem is severely damaged, and they become additionally dependent on the gaslighters for emotional support and validation. In some cases the intended (and achieved) result is to rob the victims of their sanity. The phenomenon is attested in the clinical literature as a form of narcissistic abuse whereby extreme narcissists attempt to satisfy their pathological need for constant affirmation and esteem (for “narcissistic supply”) by converting vulnerable people into intellectual and emotional slaves whom the narcissists paradoxically despise for their victimhood. Because gaslighters themselves are typically psychologically disordered, they are often not fully aware of what they are doing or why they are doing it.

Britannica online/Gaslighting

The word did not exist, but the behavior was definitely apparent in the country Dr. Woodson lived in, and the people who he was trying to educate so that they would have a sense of self, a sense of their power and agency, in other words: hope.

"In oppressive systems, History Months are not designed to appease the oppressors," they are designed to empower the oppressed. We lulled ourselves into thinking that the oppressors just needed knowledge of our history, hence the clone months for other ethnic groups and gender identities. The oppressed were "appealing to the better angels," of the oppressor class when they revealed that they never read the books printed, they never meant to read the books printed, and they sure didn't want the targets of their oppression reading the books printed, hence, the outright banning. In 2008, America elected its one, and so far only, black president, re-elected him in 2012, and to paraphrase professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., some so-called "white" people collectively lost their minds.

Bill Clinton, Toni Morrison's de facto black president before Barack Obama, birthed Newt Gingrich, "Contracts ON America," and government shutdowns, then, and every time the Republican Party has the Speaker's gavel. The current party took Reagan's throwaway line: "government IS the problem" and used it as marching orders, such that every elected member of the party - Tea Party, Freedom Caucus, or any other Orwellian self-title, is a de facto political terrorist. They took Lyndon Johnson's observation, and used it as a blueprint:

"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best-colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. [Hell], give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you." Why would an oppressive system divorce itself from such a successful strategy?

Black people didn't take your place in Ivy League Universities; the LGBT, Hispanic/Latinos and immigrants didn't "take your positions" guaranteed in previous iterations of whiteness: it was your lack of preparation, lack of desire to work in arduous conditions parallel to chattel enslavement on factory farms and meat packing plants, and neoliberal policies, by both major parties that shipped jobs overseas that could have been filled by American workers that for their reasons, were never interested in college. I possess a Doctorate of Philosophy in Nanoengineering, but I was raised by a mother who's highest formal education was an Associate Degree in Practical Nursing, and a father who on paper had a sixth-grade education, though a ninth-grade and higher reading comprehension. They managed to purchase a house that they burned the mortgage around my twelfth birthday because they owned it. They lived the "American dream" when it was affordable.

The decision to ship jobs overseas, not allowing others to live that American dream, was accomplished in corporate boardrooms lacking a considerable amount of diversity, and minimal amounts of Melanin. Those same homogeneous corporate boardrooms have invested enough dark money to write laws in their favor, and sway elections, here, and abroad. There may be a small number in that boardroom not of European ancestry, but that is for optics, and you don't have to be "white" to support white supremacy. Proximity is not itself a protection or a balm to the intimation of violence.

Barack Hussein Obama - by merely existing, and the audacity of winning - inadvertently birthed the Tea Party cum Freedom Caucus cum QAnon cum the Oval Office occupant who rode birtherism to power; Lauren Boubert and Marjorie Taylor Greene, neither of whom are with the husbands they started their congressional careers with, are part of the 53% in 2016 and 2024 who voted for someone they would never let their daughters date, or bring into their homes. To white women: proximity to white male supremacy has never been a shield from its brutality. 2016 proved this country is misogynist; 2024 proved it is that and racist, because it only wants "a single story," albeit dangerous, where Abe is honest, George could not tell a lie, and the Founding Fathers gave enough wiggle-room for a lanky politician with a funny name from Illinois, like Lincoln, to rise to the presidency. As slave owners, there was no concept of their African property having citizenship, agency, or their women being other than helpless ornaments to their prestige, and power.

"In oppressive systems, History Months are not designed to appease the oppressors," they are designed to empower the oppressed.

Q: "Why don't we have 'White History Month?'"

A: Show me where the marginalized have oppressed you.

Better yet: If you want an end to all the History Months, end the oppressive systems that require their existence. Accept history for what it is, a chronicle of the triumphs and flaws of human civilization. Humans have existed on the Earth for about 300,000 years in its many iterations, and human civilization about 6,000 years, building on its understanding of the Cosmos, from philosophy, to mathematics, to physics, chemistry, and engineering. Humans who migrated from the African continent adapted to their environments, which is why the concept of "race" could not be corroborated by the Human Genome Diversity Project (which I assume under the current climate will be renamed now), and it is rightly referred to as a social construction. The Earth has existed for 4.5 billion years, so in ratio: hominids have existed for 0.01% of that period, and civilization 1.3E-4% = 0.00013%. The Earth does not need us: We need the Earth. Migration to the stars cannot happen until we evolve here.

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 posturing, 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, The Planetary Society