The Pale Blue Dot—Look Around, We Have This

I recently read Contact by Carl Sagan, which was immensely better than the movie. The book explored the concept of faith and belief versus that of scientific inquiry, and the limitations of both. It also juxtaposed the oftentimes sterile scientific search for truth with the richness and deep complexity of the human species (and the planet Earth)- by Ben

After reading Contact, I wanted to learn more about Sagan. I’m obviously late to this game, but I came across a portion of a commencement address given by Sagan in 1996, in which he described his thoughts after seeing the famous Voyager image of Earth (the “pale blue dot”) from approximately 4 billion miles away. Here is what Sagan had to say:

“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"

This amazingly eloquent insight is one that will be eternally relevant and should inspire shock, awe and amazement to everybody that reads it. Posted at greeenology.com, click view for more information

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