As I advance my readings on "Cosmos", the bestseller by Carl Sagan, I begin to realize how small and unimportant the human beings are, considering the infinity of the universe. And in the same time, it's impossible not to consider the degree of evolution we've reached along the millenia.

Way back in the days, our ancestors were eager to understand the world but had not quite stumbled upon the method. They imagined a small, quaint, tidy universe in which the dominant forces were ficticious supreme beings called "Gods". In that universe humans played an important (if not central) role. We were intimately bound up with the rest of nature.

Today we have discovered a powerful and elegant way to understand the universe, a method called science; it has revealed to us a universe so ancient and so vast that human affairs seem at first sight to be of little consequence. We have grown distant from the cosmos. It has seemed remote and irrelevant to everyday concerns. But science has found not only that the universe has a reeling and ecstatic grandeur, not only that it is accessible to human understanding, but also that we are, in a very real and profound sense, a part of that cosmos, born from it, our fate deeply connected with it. The most basic human events and the most trivial trace back to the universe and its origins.

Humans have also developed great "entities" other than science, and along the years these "entities" have made it impossible for science to advance independently. Because science is inseparable from the rest of the human endeavor, it cannot be discussed without making contact, sometimes glancing, sometimes head on, with a number of social, political, religious and philosophical issues.

Science is an ongoing process. It never ends. There is no single ultimate truth to be achieved, after which all the scientists can retire. And because this is so, the world is far more interesting, both for the scientists and for the millions of people in every nation who, while not professional scientists, are deeply interested in the methods and findings of science.

Science has given a lot of clarity to the humankind, specially about the place we all inhabit, a place that is just as special and unique as us: the Earth.

The Earth is a place. It is by no means the only place. It is not even a typical place. No planet or star or galaxy can be typical, because the universe is mostly empty. The only typical palce is within the vast, cold, universal vacuum, the everlasting night of intergalactic space, a place so strange and desolate that, by comparison, planets and stars and galaxies seems achingly rare and lovely.

Our "place", our Earth, is just a tiny, fragile, blue-white world, lost in a cosmic ocean vast beyond our most courageous imaginings. It is a world among an imensity of others. It may be significant only for us. The Earth is our home, our parent. Our kind of life arose and evolved here. The human species is coming of age here. It is on this world that we developed our passion for exploring the universe, and it is here that we are, in some pain and with no guarantees, working out our destiny.

This is planet Earth: a place of blue nitrogen skies, oceans of liquid water, cool forests and soft meadows, a world positively rippling with life. In the cosmic perspective it is poignantly beautiful and rare; but it is also, for the moment, unique. In all our journeying through space and time, it is, so far, the only world on which we know with certainty that the matter of the cosmos has become alive and aware. There must be many such worlds scattered through space, but our search for them begins here, with the accumulated wisdom of the men and women of our species, garnered at great cost over a million years. We are privileged to live among brilliant and passionately inquisitive people, and in a time when the search for knowledge is generally prized. Human beings, born ultimately of the stars and now for a while inhabiting a world called Earth, have began their long voyage home.

Our ancients knew that the world is very old. They sought to look into the distant past. We now know that the universe is far older than they ever imagined. We have examined the universe in space and seen that we live on a mote of dust circling a humdrum star in the remotest corner of an obscure galaxy. And if we are a speck in the immensity of space, we also occupy an instant in the expanse of ages. We know now that our universe - or at least its more recent incarnation - is some fifteen or twenty billion years old. This is the time since a remarkable explosive event called the Big Bang. At the beginning of this universe, there were no galaxies, stars or planets, no life or civilizations, merely a uniform, radiant fireball filling all of space. The passage from the chaos of the Big Bang to the cosmos that we are beginning to know is the most awesome transformation of matter and energy that we have been privileged to glimpse. And until we find more intelligent beings elsewhere, we are ourselves the most spectacular of all the transformations - the remote descendants of the Big Bang , dedicated to understanding and further transforming the universe from which we spring.

By knowing and comprehending all of this, at least one thing is undoubtly certain: we are not meant to be small in our world; because no matter how great you become, compared to the cosmos you would be less than the 1.000.000.000.000th piece of a grain of sand.

Based on the book "Cosmos". Copyright © 1980 by Carl Sagan Productions,Inc.

------------

All rights reserved under International and Pan American Copyright conventions. Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.