Once you've been in space, you appreciate how small and fragile the Earth is.
It takes an earthquake to remind us that we walk on the crust of an unfinished planet.
You get this overview effect where you realize how small we are and how fragile our planet is and how we're really all in it together. You don't see borders from space, you don't see diversity and differences in people on Earth.
Man - life in general - seems irrelevant to the workings of the universe: a mere smudge of water, grease, and carbon on a pinpoint planet circling a star of no special consequence.
There's no question that if we stay on planet Earth and never leave, that eventually we'll be wiped out.
Earth would soon Be uninhabitable as the moon. What for that matter had it ever been? Who advised man to come and live therein?
We're still under the weight of this impression that the ocean is too big to fail, that the planet is too big to fail.
Only one of the many life support systems on which we depend - soils, aquifers, rainfall, ice, the pattern of winds and currents, pollinators, biological abundance and diversity - need fail for everything to slide.
There is but one Earth, tiny and fragile, and one must get 100,000 miles away to appreciate fully one's good fortune in living on it.
The planet Earth, though not threatened with destruction by man-made global warming, is by no means indestructible. There are many unpredictable events within our solar system, and still more outside it, that could make Earth uninhabitable by humans.
I think I am like most people in letting myself worry about things that didn't matter. Concepts like quotidian and humdrum prevented me for years from really absorbing the miraculous strangeness of bombing around a star on a tottering planet, of watching the world unfold in time.
we are so little, so ignorant, so feeble an infant race crawling on a planet between immensities we haven't even begun to understand, that really we have no grounds for either congratulation or despair.
