Earth Week: Inspiration from A Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan
“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us… everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives on this mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam…
… 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”
Carl Sagan
In my years as an ABSC practitioner, every time I finish a sentence in a discussion, debate, or simple conversation, a little voice within me says, "What if you are wrong?" Initially, it was just a thought; now, it is an order saying, "Reflect!"—seeing myself in the other's shoes, from the other's point of view, seeing myself in the mirror of the other person because now I know there are no absolutes, only points of view, and reflections of them.
In the grand scheme of things, I have arrived at the same conclusion after observing the course of my life and global events. Our world is an intricate web of interconnectedness where nothing is certain. Despite our innate desire to connect with others, humans have been in constant conflict throughout history, often over national identity, race, beliefs, religion, education, and countless others. This persistent behavior has caused us to repeat the same mistakes over and over again, generation after generation.
We just don't get it!
Even though I live in one of the planet's hot spots, Venezuela, I try to be as objective as possible as I witness these times, doing what I can with what I've got and looking at things from the vantage point of an inhabitant of this planet—my home.
Nevertheless, being too close to the events and suffering their consequences in my own skin causes me to lose objectivity frequently; therefore, again, as if conversing with the world, I need to reflect myself in a mirror much more prominent than myself to gain perspective.
Carl Sagan's writing helped me to gain perspective again, "…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…"
It is not about our beliefs, country, race, religion, education, or social status. It is about us as human beings experiencing a journey on this life on this planet, which is not more than a dot in the immensity of space.
"The Pale Blue Dot" is a photograph of Earth taken by NASA's Voyager 1 on February 14, 1990, at a distance of 3.7 billion miles (6 billion kilometers) from the Sun.
Nasa does not say it, but the picture was taken after Carl Sagan insisted to that organization that the spacecraft took a picture of our planet before shutting off its cameras after completing its mission.
María Popova narrated how it happened in the article Happy Birthday Pale Blue Dot, published on February 14, 2013. Here is her account.
The photograph almost never happened — the NASA imaging team feared that aiming the camera at the Sun would damage it. But Sagan himself lobbied long and hard for an attempt. Vice Adm. Richard Truly, former head of NASA, recalls:
I did get a visit from Carl Sagan. We talked about a lot of things. And somewhere in that conversation he mentioned this idea. I thought, heck, with Voyager so far away, if it could turn around and take a picture of the different planets including the Earth, that that would really be cool. And so I was a great advocate of it, although I can’t take any credit for it.
Candice Hansen-Koharcheck was one of the two University of Arizona scientists who developed the command sequence that controlled the timing for each photograph's exposure. That day, she was sitting in front of a computer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab with her shades drawn when she noticed the tiny speck on an image sent back by the camera she had helped design, which was now 4 billion miles away. She told NPR a few years ago:
It was just a little dot, about two pixels big, three pixels big, so not very large. … You know, I still get chills down my back because here was our planet, bathed in this ray of light, and it just looked incredibly special.
The image inspired the title of scientist Carl Sagan's book, "Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space,” of which you can read its preface:
From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any 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.
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.
For a different perspective, look at this video by Become Human.
Next on Earth week: A Brave and Startling Truth.
