Pale Blue Dot
Sunday, April 25, 2010A painting created by a local artist today changed my life forever. I knew there was more to the song by Receiving End of Sirens than I had fathomed. I used to listen to it over and over again as I lay in my mosquitoe-netted cot in Africa listening to the midnight noises of Lugazi. When I returned I still listened to it on repeat as I lay on my mum's bed in Mesa. Then I discovered this painting a few weeks ago at a coffee shop and couldn't believe that what I had imagined as I listened to the song was perfectly transcribed onto canvas in my local coffee shop. And today, as I was there reading my book I noticed it had been moved and there was the artist's name and number on a plaque next to it. An hour later I owned it and carried it with me as I walked home so happy. Pale Blue Dot. It's magnificent. Thank you Patric.
Here's the photograph that Carl Sagan had taken from the spacecraft Voyager when it's vantage point reached the end of the Solar System.
3.7 billion miles away.
Earth is the "Pale Blue Dot" in the rightmost brown line.Carl Sagan's address relating his thoughts on a deeper meaning on the photograph:
From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of 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.
Posts
