Miraclo Miles

- January 07, 2007

A distant speck:
A little pre-week perspective

This shot was taken in 1990 by the Voyager 1 spacecraft as it was on its way out of the Solar System, looking back on the planets it had visited as it was instructed to do by signals radioed to it from Ground Control. One of the shots, by accident, captured a location it hadn't, technically, visited.

That tiny speck of light, roughly 4 billion miles from the robotic probe, between the two white lines, is Earth.

Four years later, during a lecture at Cornell on October 13th, astronomer Carl Sagan presented this shot, and offered the following considerations to his audience:

"We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every 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 in 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 the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. 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. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, 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 and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."

A worthwhile set of ideas to keep in mind, a good reference point for perspective-building, and something to keep in mind as I head into a week that's guaranteed to have several trying stretches, tense moments, and will be building a head of pressure set to explode and scald me sometime Friday unless I can make some things happen.

Tags: Earth, perspective