Pale blue dot: A tribute to Carl Sagan

After writing today about Stoicism and particularly about an exercise called "The view from above" I was reminded of Carl Sagan. Yet again.

As a little boy I was always inspired by things that made me wonder. To me this is the most precious state that kids have, but adults tend to lose. Especially wonderous to me was (and still is) the Cosmos. The billions of stars and planets, the vast space which seem empty, but is full of dark matter and neutrinos flying at enormous speed. The fact that light travels at such an incredible speed but yet it takes for it 4 years to travel to us from the closest star. And the fact that there are more than 100 billion stars in our galaxy - "The milky way" and in the same time there are more than 100 billion galaxies our there. This is just mind-boggling.

I think that waking in a kid the sense of wonder is the biggest gift.

Carl Sagan did that but not only for kids. He did it for everyone.

He was not the most loved and appreciated scientist by fellow scientists. His method was not "rigorous enough" for many of them. But those who recognized what he was actually doing for science loved him. Carl Sagan inspired a whole generation of scientists to pursue their dreams. He gave them the gift of wonder. The television series "Cosmos" became the most widely watched series in the history of American public television. What his fellow critiques never understood was that he did more for science than any of them. Neil deGrasse Tyson (who is one of the kids Sagan inspired) is receiving similar feedback from some people these days, which I will never be able to understand.

"Pale blue dot" is the most distant photograph of our small planet, taken from some distance of 6 billion kilometers(3.7 billion miles)! It was taken back in February 1990 from Voyager 1, whose mission is still on after more than 40 years! Now Voyager one is more than 21 million km away, which makes it the most distant man-made object from Earth. But it still communicates with us! Take a look at our Earth from 6 000 000 000km:

"Pale blue dot" was Carl Sagan's idea. I will leave you with his words from a book with the same name, which I happen to have in my library :)

“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 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. 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.

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.”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot