Vanity and Truth

The bane of daft humanity
Is our accursed vanity;
For centuries we saw ourselves,
Not as something small,
But on a cosmic stage,
At the focus of it all.
The planet Earth was central,
Around which all revolved.
To us it might seem mental,
Yet our ancestral sages thought 
That God up in his Heaven,
Had nothing else to do,
But sit with bated breath,
Watching me and you.

To get a true perspective,
Science is our friend.
Our lunacy collective,
We really must amend.
If we are just mad monkeys,
Our future looks quite grim,
The light of civilisation
Will very soon grow dim.
It's not about technology,
Or half-baked sociology,
But knowing Nature's kingdom
May grant a kind of wisdom
To care for ourselves better.

Our first views of the Earth from space
Gave insight to the human race.
We saw the world a different way,
Which changed our way of life today
To one not quite so feckless
As it otherwise would have been.

Some people may not care
If life exists elsewhere;
They'd rather cash was spent on cars
Than on exploring rocky Mars.
I think they are entirely wrong:
Our true place in Creation
Is what we must explain;
To know the truth won't set us free
But it might make us sane.
 

This work is so strongly linked by theme to the previous post, The Red Planet 

 that I thought to make them one. It would have been a bit long, though.