"...And the world impoverishes itself by spending a trillion dollars a year on preparations for war, and by employing perhaps half the scientists and high technologists on the planet in military endeavors. How would we explain all this to a dispassionate extra-terrestrial observer? What account would we give of our stewardship of the planet Earth? We have heard the rationale offered by the superpowers. We know who speaks for the nations, but who speaks for the human species? Who speaks for Earth?

From an extra-terrestrial perspective our global civilization is clearly on the edge of failure in the most important task it faces: preserving the lives and well being of its citizens, and the future habitability of the planet. But if we're willing to live with the growing likelihood of nuclear war, shouldn't we also be willing to explore vigorously every possible means to prevent nuclear war? Shouldn't we consider in every nation major changes in the traditional ways of doing things, a fundamental restructuring of economic, political, social and religious institutions? We've reached a point where there can be no more special interest or special cases, nuclear arms threaten every person on the earth.

Fundamental changes in society are sometimes labeled impractical or contrary to human nature. As if nuclear war were practical, or as if there were only one human nature. But fundamental changes can clearly be made, we're surrounded by them. In the last two centuries, abject slavery which was with us for thousands of years has almost entirely been eliminated in a stirring worldwide revolution. Women, systematically mistreated for millennia, are gradually gaining the political and economic power traditionally denied to them. And some wars of aggression have recently been stopped or curtailed because of a revulsion felt by the people in the aggressor nations. The old appeals to racial, sexual and religious chauvinism and to rabid nationalist fervor are beginning not to work. A new consciousness is developing which sees the earth as a single organism, and recognizes that an organism at war with itself is doomed. We are one planet."

Carl Sagan
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, 1980
Episode 13 "Who Speaks For Earth?"