Our Pale Blue Dot And The Human Experience
Posted on May 11, 2007 | Category: Learning, Purpose
Carl Sagan wrote the following words after viewing the first images of earth by Voyager 1 in February, 1990. As the spacecraft left our planetary neighborhood for the fringes of the solar system, engineers turned it around for one last look at planet earth to capture an image that was merely a dot.
Below is another image of a dot that is our planet - captured from the robotic Cassini spacecraft now orbiting Saturn. Sagan really knows how to put things in perspective.
“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
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One Response to “Our Pale Blue Dot And The Human Experience”
June 8th, 2007 at 10:43 am
Mark,
Thanks for visiting my site and linking to this article. I appreciate it. This is just the kind of thing I think about frequently, but it has the opposite affect on me, it humbles me but it also depresses me, because I want deperately to know the why. Why this now? Why on the pale blue dot? What is it? What am I? etc. It is strange that even though I get a sense of sadness from it.
When I write of depression, it isn’t the kind you may think of, the clinical kind. It is the existential kind, that come from knowing how little you know and likely will ever know.
One thing I am going to expand upon in upcoming post - just because our culture doesn’t value descriptions and admissions of mental or psychic pain doesn’t mean they do not have value. People describe the pain they suffer to build large muscles or run marathons, and we hold no shame in that, but to admit to suffer mental anguish is considered taboo or ‘mental illness’ when it may be only be part of our growth process, our evolution.