Pale Blue Dot – by Carl Sagan

This offering ‘Pale Blue Dot’ from Carl Sagan, an astronomer, cosmologist, astrophysicist, and astrobiologist who popularised science takes us on a journey of space exploration. It seriously puts our Earth into perspective and shows us that really, in the grand scheme of things, we’re not that important.

‘A vision of the human future in space’

Pale Blue Dot Summary

“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.” 

A spacecraft in Early 1990 took a picture of Earth 3.7 billion miles away from Earth. It took 5.5 hours travelling at the speed of light to reach us. From the perspective of this image, there is no signs of humans, not the remaking of the Earth’s surface, not our machines, not ourselves. From here, our obsession with nationalism is nowhere in evidence.

The pictures convey to multitudes something very well known to astronomers, on the scale of the worlds – to say nothing of the stars or galaxies – humans are inconsequential, a thin film of life on an obscure and solitary lump of rock and metal. Think of that pale blue dot from this vantage point. Then try and convince yourself that God created the world for one of the 10 million species of life that inhabit that speck of dust. Now take it a step further, imagine that everything was made just for a  single shade of that species, or gender, or ethnic or religious subdivision.  

If this doesn’t strike you as unlikely, then pick another dot. Imagine it to be inhabited by a different form of intelligent life. They too cherish the notion of a God who has created everything for their benefit. How seriously do you take their claim?  

5 billion years from now, after it is burned to a crisp or swallowed by the sun, there will be other worlds and stars and galaxies into being and they will know nothing of the Earth. Too many it still seems fitting that because of an accident of birth, our group (whichever that is) should have a central position on the social universe  

Many of the debates in the history of science seem to be, at least in part contests over which humans are special. Almost always the going in assumption is that we are special. After the premise is closely examined, though it turns out – in many cases – that we are not.

The Great Demotions 

• Us humans once positioned ourselves as the center of the universe. But Galileo’s telescope revealed that there are other worlds like ours orbiting the sun. 
• We then assumed the sun is the center of the galaxy. But by the 19th Century observational astronomy made it clear the sun is a lonely star in a great self-gravitating assemblage of stars called the Milky way.
• We then assumed the Milky Way is the center of the galaxy. Scientists then found the Milky Way is one of hundreds of billions of other galaxies   

Modern science has been a voyage into the unknown with a lesson in humility at every step. We aren’t that special, if we screw up the Pale Blue Dot, there is no sign that help will come from elsewhere.   

“We were hunters and foragers. The frontier was everywhere. We were bounded only by the earth, and the ocean, and the sky. The open road still softly calls. Our little terraqueous globe as the madhouse of those hundred thousand millions of worlds. We, who cannot even put our own planetary home in order, riven with rivalries and hatreds; are we to venture out into space?

By the time we are ready to settle even the nearest other planetary systems, we will have changed. The simple passage of so many generations will have changed us; necessity will have changed us. We are… an adaptable species. It will not be we who reach Alpha Centauri and the other nearby stars. It will be a species very like us, but with more of our strengths, and fewer of our weaknesses; more confident, farseeing, capable and prudent.

For all our failings, despite our limitations and fallibilities, we humans are capable of greatness. What new wonders undreamt of in our time, will we have wrought in another generation, and another? How far will our nomadic species have wandered, by the end of the next century, and the next millennium?

Our remote descendants, safely arrayed on many worlds through the solar system, and beyond, will be unified, by their common heritage, by their regard for their home planet, and by the knowledge that, whatever other life may be, the only humans in all the universe, come from Earth. They will gaze up and strain to find the blue dot in their skies. They will marvel at how vulnerable the repository of all our potential once was, how perilous our infancy, how humble our beginnings, how many rivers we had to cross, before we found our way.”