We've asked people to publish a post if they want to submit an entry for the creative writing contest.
However, when it comes to recommending certain entries — those originally published outside the Forum, especially by someone other than the submitter — people have expressed reasonable concerns about:
- Violating copyright or other norms by sharing someone's work in full on another website without permission from the author or the original publisher.
- Creating top-level posts for work they aren't sure is a good fit for the contest.
So we've created this thread for people to submit first published elsewhere without creating top-level posts.
In general, we'd still prefer top-level posts, since those are more likely to reach readers. But we understand the concerns we've heard, and we'll still consider submissions for the contest if you share links to them in a comment here.
(If you are submitting original content, please use a top-level post rather than leaving a comment. I promise that you won't be cluttering the Forum, and you're welcome to use a pseudonym if you'd prefer.)
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 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, 1994