“The Pale Blue Dot” by Carl E. Sagan
Finding significance in an expansive pool of vastness
Currently 13,315,289,091 miles from earth, deep in interstellar space is the Voyager 1. The space probe commissioned 41 years ago by NASA, is on a mission to explore beyond our solar system and into the mysteries of interstellar space. And as of this writing, has recorded flybys of Jupiter, Saturn, as well as Titan (Saturn’s largest moon).
Attached to the space probe, is a golden record (Voyager Interstellar Record) containing a message for any extraterrestrial intelligence that might encounter it, or yet, receive a signal from it. Curated by a committee led by astronomer, astrophysicist, author, cosmologist and scientist Carl Sagan, the messages contain “earth sounds” ranging from music by Bach to Beethoven, a baby’s cry, a train, and dozens of spoken greetings in different human languages. Also encoded in it, are images [in analog] that depict who, and what we are. This record, you can now listen to on SoundCloud – yes, SoundCloud.
Undoubtedly, the Voyager 1 has been one of humanity’s greatest feats in the field of science.
On February 14, 1990, at Carl Sagan’s request, the Voyager 1 [3.7 billion miles away from earth] was instructed to turn around and take one last look at it’s home planet. The image it captured, portrayed the earth as an inconsequential point of light. A blue dot not more than 0.12 pixel in size. Paling immeasurably in comparison to the vastness of space around it.
In Carl’s book “Pale blue dot”, inspired by that image, is an excerpt which encapsulates just how truly insignificant we are on the cosmic landscape.
Here, are his great words —
“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
My hope is after reading this, you come to realize that just as insignificant humanity is, hidden deep in a constantly expanding universe [which may very well be just one of many existing universes] we have no choice but to call home — we might quite possibly be the only form of intelligent life to have evolved from the mixtures of planetary-forming matter and particles released at the creation of the universe.
And the onus of ensuring that life does not die out, lies solely on us.
