The Pale Blue Dot

Carl Sagan is a deceased astronaut astronomer. And that miniscule blue dot inside the blue circle is Earth.

He is one of the few people to have ever existed who could claim to have pondered global events with a truly broad perspective.

When you’ve considered the earth from 6,1 billion miles (roughly 10 billion kilometres) away, you’d have to be Paris Hilton to walk away devoid of some newly-gleaned insight into your own existence.

This, from the wonder that is WikiPedia:

The Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of planet Earth taken in 1990 by Voyager 1 from a record distance, showing it against the vastness of space. By request of Carl Sagan, NASA commanded the Voyager 1 spacecraft, having completed its primary mission and now leaving the Solar System, to turn its camera around and to take a photograph of Earth across a great expanse of space.

Carl wasn’t on the spacecraft when it snapped that picture. He was planted squarely on terra firma (in a Houston control room, with laminated wood paneling, I like to think). But it was by his specific request that the Voyager 1 took that picture from a very long, long way away. In some respects, Carl was the man with his eye pressed against the shutter when that picture was snapped. And yes, he did come away with some amazingly worded insight, which he published in his book, titled, surprisingly, The Pale Blue Dot.

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider again 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.

He goes on.

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.

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.

For Carl, the pale Blue Dot is exclusively a reminder of our smallness in relation to the universe. I have faith in one of the confident religions that Carl mentions, and while he may believe that the Pale Blue Dot represents our supreme isolation – and this humbles him – for others it represents our tinyness (maybe a Sarah Palin word). For some, the beauty of the pale blue dot is a reminder of the relationship between them and their creator. That humbles me.

If your brain is already in weekend mode, let’s appreciate the picture for itself. How radical is that beam of sunlight? Please note, we’re basking smack bang in the middle of it.

Radical

Quite pretty, non?

“But what does it mean?!”

Enjoy your very, very, very small party this weekend folks.

[Thanks, Hilt!]