You are Here

Part of my summer reading has included Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot. The book mainly is a justification/call for scientific research in/on space. Sagan is defending NASA funding (and other endeavors like it). I recommend the book if only for the pictures, which range from capturing the grandeur of galaxies, to portraits that merely encompass our little earth. Most of the book is explaining what all was gained and advanced by the Voyager expeditions, as well as the Apollo missions and others. One quick example is that the way we discovered that CFC's react with ozone molecules the way that they do, stemmed from scientists working on different chemical reactions which would be taking place in the atmosphere of Venus, which contains large amounts of cholrine and flourine. I'm not promoting NASA funding, mainly because I don't know enough about it, but the book does give you some good examples that can combat the ignorant, unthought ramblings of people who say space research is useless in light of the current issues here on earth. There certainly has been and can be much gained from such studies.

After that digression, I'll get to the quote this post was intended for, which has little if anything to do with the previous paragraph. It comes from chapter 1, titled "You are Here". I actually used a bit of this for a speech in one of my comm classes and feel that it is one of the most inspirational while at the same time, put-in-our-place couple of paragraphs I've ever read.

 Within the blue circle is the "pale blue dot" we call home. The picture was taken by a Voyager satellite as it left our solar system and turned around for a look back. Enjoy:

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 there 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.