The Cosmos is all there is or was or ever will be.

"The Cosmos is all there is or was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us -- there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries."

37 years ago on this day, (28th September, 1980) Carl Sagan launched millions of people around the world into the greatest cosmic journey with one of the grandest tales ever told, Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. The thirteen episode series taught us how to love people, how to overcome prejudice, how to get rid of superstitions, how to ignore dogma and question authority, how to consider yourself a citizen of the cosmos. It taught us how insignificant we are in the vast cosmic arena, yet how we can leave our monumental footprints if we can unite as a species leaving the discriminating traits that humans have created. The one show that can change your life's point of view :)

It's a really big coincidence how I came to know that today is the 37th anniversary of the series first being aired. I visited Youtube to listen to the Pale Blue Dot speech by Sagan only to find the specific clip that had been in my favorite list for a long time has been taken down due to a copyright claim. I found alternatives but was kinda upset as that clip had really moving soundtrack. I then searched for Carl Sagan and then Cosmos on Google and was really surprised to see the first airing date of the Cosmos: A Personal Voyage to be listed as 28th September, 1980 in Google snippets! 

The above picture is a quote from Carl Sagan's book, A Pale Blue Dot. An excerpt from the book narrated by Sagan will surely move you. Listen to it here, the transcript is given below.

"Consider again 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 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. 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.

Our posturings, 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: A Vision of the Human Future in Space