...a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam
Friday, June 19th, 2015 09:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
serai.
The spacecraft was a long way from home. I thought it might be a good idea, just after Saturn, to have them take one last glance homeward. From Saturn, the Earth would appear too small for Voyager to make out any detail. Our planet would just be a point of light, a lonely pixel, hardly distinguishable from the many other points of light Voyager would see: nearby planets, far-off suns. But precisely because of the obscurity of our world thus revealed, such a picture might be worth having.
It had been well understood by the scientists and philosophers of classical antiquity that the Earth was a mere point in a vast, encompassing cosmos. But no one had ever seen it as such. Here was our first chance, and perhaps also our last, for decades to come.
So here they are: a mosaic of squares laid down on top of the planets, and a background smattering of more distant stars. Because of the reflection of sunlight off the spacecraft, the Earth seems to be sitting in a beam of light, as if there were some special significance to this small world. But it's just an accident of geometry and optics.
There is no sign of humans in this picture. Not our reworking of the Earth's surface, not our machines, not ourselves. From this vantage point, our obsession with nationalism is nowhere in evidence. We are too small. On the scale of worlds humans are inconsequential, a thin film of life on an obscure and solitary lump of rock and metal.
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 supreme leader, every superstar, 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 endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of another corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors, so that in glory and triumph they can become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. 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 a 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. 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 experiment. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceit than this distant image of our tiny world. It underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the only home we've ever known:
The pale blue dot.
Pale Blue Dot - Carl Sagan
.
The spacecraft was a long way from home. I thought it might be a good idea, just after Saturn, to have them take one last glance homeward. From Saturn, the Earth would appear too small for Voyager to make out any detail. Our planet would just be a point of light, a lonely pixel, hardly distinguishable from the many other points of light Voyager would see: nearby planets, far-off suns. But precisely because of the obscurity of our world thus revealed, such a picture might be worth having.
It had been well understood by the scientists and philosophers of classical antiquity that the Earth was a mere point in a vast, encompassing cosmos. But no one had ever seen it as such. Here was our first chance, and perhaps also our last, for decades to come.
So here they are: a mosaic of squares laid down on top of the planets, and a background smattering of more distant stars. Because of the reflection of sunlight off the spacecraft, the Earth seems to be sitting in a beam of light, as if there were some special significance to this small world. But it's just an accident of geometry and optics.
There is no sign of humans in this picture. Not our reworking of the Earth's surface, not our machines, not ourselves. From this vantage point, our obsession with nationalism is nowhere in evidence. We are too small. On the scale of worlds humans are inconsequential, a thin film of life on an obscure and solitary lump of rock and metal.
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 supreme leader, every superstar, 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 endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of another corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors, so that in glory and triumph they can become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. 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 a 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. 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 experiment. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceit than this distant image of our tiny world. It underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the only home we've ever known:
The pale blue dot.
Pale Blue Dot - Carl Sagan
.
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Date: Saturday, June 20th, 2015 03:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Saturday, June 20th, 2015 03:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Sunday, June 21st, 2015 09:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Monday, July 6th, 2015 07:25 pm (UTC)Plus, I deeply believe that all the nasty, horrifying antagonism that has arisen between science and religion in the last twenty years is due in big part to Carl not being there anymore. He was like a buffer between them, the public face of science, and it was a calm, polite, kind face. Because his focus was on educating as many people as he could about science, he never called people names or made them feel bad either about not knowing science, or about having religious belief. He was smart enough to know you don't get anywhere that way - he even said so publicly, and chastised those in the scientific and atheist communities for the tensions he saw, which weren't nearly as bad back then. Again, the calm voice saying, Hey, let's calm down, everybody. Don't be mean. You don't have to be mean. Who in the scientific world is bothering to say that anymore? Hell, even Carl's successor, Neil de Grasse Tyson, is a complete asshole when it comes to things he can't be bothered with. Carl had a well-rounded education, so he knew the value of all those subjects atheists sneer at these days, if not as focuses of belief, then as important cultural phenomena that shaped our entire worldview. With that voice silenced, it's all turned into armed camps that just hate each other. You know, for people who go on about how you don't need religion to be decent, I don't see much fucking decency in a lot of that camp.
*sigh*