Our Pale Blue Dot

I have a poster on my wall. In it, a portion of the text of Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot is shaped as an arrow and overlaid on the photo of earth taken by Voyager 1 for which the book was named. I have transcribed the text below.

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 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.

Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot 1994

I bought this poster when I moved out of my parent’s house and into my college dorm. It served as a comfort to me. When seemingly everything was changing, when I was leaving everything I had known behind, I would go over to that poster and I would read it. It’s always had a way of bending time for me. Of making every hard time seem a little bit shorter, and making those magical times in life when everything seems perfect all the more precious. After every hard test, bad day, or week when I just needed something to go my way I would wander over to that poster and read it, and revel in the knowledge that my problems were, in reality, oh so very small. On the days when I don’t feel like enough, I read it and revel in just being, beholden to nothing to aside from my own insignificance. 

            But on a day like today, I read it in a different way. I read it and realize how incredibly small we are. And for what a short blink of time we have actually been on this planet. On a cosmic scale, every sweeping decision we have made, every law, every cultural development, every border a passing fad. Precedent that seems set in stone is really a brave new experiment, so young that no one can deliver a clear verdict on its outcome.

            From this perspective, it becomes deeply saddening that a large group of people in this country cling to a privilege. A group of people who claim unalienable right to access a technology by virtue of the wisdom of a long dead group of white men who have been enshrouded in the infallible veil of history and patriotism. A technology still in such cosmic infancy that we, let alone our ancestors, cannot begin to understand its true place in our society. And who, by claiming the right to this technology and supporting its presence, willingly sacrifice the lives of tens of thousands of people every year.  

            The reality is that life is terrifying. Not in the way the news suggests. Not terrorism, gun violence, or natural disasters. But in that realization, looking back at the pale blue dot, of how fragile this all is. Of how small we really are. I think every young person transitioning into adulthood has a realization. One day you wake up and realize that everyone is just as confused as you are. They may have figured out the little stuff that seems beguiling at times. They may have figured out how to pay their bills on time and keep food in the refrigerator, or mastered some difficult technical skill or shown a particular aptitude for an art. But they haven’t figured out the big stuff. They don’t know the meaning of life, they don’t know what comes after it, and they don’t know what may lead to a more verdant and peaceful society. So we turn to others. We hope that they are different than us. That they aren’t hamstrung with our doubts and insecurities and are instead endowed with leadership skills and great wisdom. We place these select few into positions of power and cultural significance, and at times an entire society’s hopes and fears rest on their shoulders.

            The best of these leaders bear this burden. They hide their fear and doubt, or perhaps candidly and often charmingly acknowledge it, and press on regardless, doing their best to better their fellow man. But in the far more dangerous case, a chosen figurehead may mistake the power thrust upon them as a sign of infallibility, and gain unwarranted confidence in their every thought. The underlying premise in both cases is the same: we are all colossally, cosmically ignorant children fumbling in around in the dark, trying to find a light switch. We can either sit down and discuss how one might find the switch, or instead insist that we’ve found it, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

The most telling line in Sagan’s piece is this: “there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves”. That means no one is coming from those far off galaxies to help us. But it also means no one from the past is going to save us. They’ve left their writings, papers, and art as a guide, but it is by no means infallible. It’s riddled with the same mistakes and missteps that our history, and our present, is. Instead, we can find comfort somewhere else. We can look around at the world that surrounds us and see the great structures, achievements, humanitarian triumphs, and emblems of love and passion that fill our society. We can recognize that humans, as flawed and insecure as ourselves made these things, not out of infinite wisdom but in spite of it. With this recognition we can take a leap of faith and make a change that is unprecedented in our society. We can jump into the unknown. Not because we are certain of the outcome, but because we know that those who are still alive on this planet are the only ones that can make decisions for us. Because we know that those that came before us took the same leaps of faith and found solid ground. We must make the sobering realization that nothing about the whole of human society has ever truly been great. We must redefine patriotism not as the preservation of an ideal but as the pursuit of one. We must continue to build a society that holds as it highest ideal the preservation of what, to the best of our knowledge, is the most rarified and beautiful thing in all existence: life, the universe’s only way of knowing itself.