Don’t Read This If You’re Feeling Insignificant Either
I’m going to stick with the science theme for another post since my last post, the incredible picture of Saturn, reminded me of one of my favorite quotations from Carl Sagan.
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It’s called Reflections on a Mote of Dust, and it’s an excerpt from a commencement address that he gave in 1996. Here’s the excerpt that relates to the picture at right (photo taken from Voyager 1 in 1990):
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“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.”
-Carl Sagan
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It completely captures my imagination to look at that picture and imagine the same little white dot millions of years ago, hurtling through space, our ancestors roaming its surface and huddling in its caves, struggling to survive.
Sagan said it far better than I ever could, but in the middle of such an important time in history - and in the wake of an election - this served as a reminder to me that (1) we really do control our own destiny and that we’ve come too far to screw it up now, and (2) that maybe, just maybe - in the whole grand scheme of things - that all of material things we feel are so important…
… aren’t.
No matter what subjects you’re normally interested in, there are very few books that I can recommend more highly than The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan (see link below). I can only think of a dozen books offhand that are bulletproof recommendations for intellectually curious people and polymaths, and this is one of them (fair warning - if you are dogmatically religious, you probably won’t appreciate the recommendation).
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