I've been keeping a low profile lately as post-holiday work has been
a bear and I've not had the motivation to write. But I'm catching up
on things today and saw a phost by gunnarfrost that caught my eye
[0]. He mentions the view of earth from space and how this has
shaped our philosophical views of the meaning of life. This made me
think of Carl Sagan's the 'Pale Blue Dot' [1][2], which is about the
view of Earth from Voyager I, seen as a tiny speck from about six
million kilometers away. Here is the quote:
"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.
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."
The Library of Congress has the audio recording of the quote, as
spoken by the author himself [3].
[0]
gopher://sdf.org/0/users/gunnarfrost/20180116.post
[1]
gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/Pale_Blue_Dot
[2]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Blue_Dot
[3]
https://www.loc.gov/item/cosmos000110/
