Spiritual Mindfuck- The Pale Blue Dot

(i googled blue dot because i wanted some information on the application and I stumbled upon this. Needless to say this is a thousand times cooler.)

The image to your left is called the Pale Blue Dot photo and the faint dot in the middle of that blue outline is the Earth. It is the Earth in a beam of sunlight. It was taken from over 400 billion miles away. The whole thing blows my mind.

From the Wikipedia article:

On February 14, 1990, Nasa commanded the Voyager 1 spacecraft, having completed its primary mission, to turn around to photograph the planets it had visited. NASA ultimately compiled 60 images from this unique event into a mosaic of the solar system.One image Voyager returned was of Earth, 4 billion miles (6.4 billion kilometres) distant, showing up as a "pale blue dot" in the grainy photo.

In That dot is all that we are and that we will ever be, all our hopes, and all our dreams. It is so beyond my level of understanding. But Carl Sagan said it far better than I ever could in a graduation address (and we got the CEO of GM; awesome):

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.

(here's a video of Sagan reciting it.)



Certainly puts things in perspective. Like everything in perspective. And to think that a planet so small and so insignificant in the span of the universe would be the only one with life seems just a bit more ludicrous. There could be a billion of these "little dots" and with worlds and histories and civilizations like ours that think, that when they look into the dark night sky that there is only emptiness and death, never realizing that we're here thinking the same thing.
The image below is Earth (the smaller, fainter dot at the top) and Mars taken from Jupiter; that really helps to give the tinniest sense of just our solar system.
And though thinking about our insignificance in the greatest scheme of things may seem depressing and nihilistic I prefer to be an optimist. Maybe times people complain that they can't make a difference because the world is so big, but looking here you realize how small it is; you can't be intimidated by something that size. But something that size you should also feel a sense of parentage to and protection towards because it is so small and fragile and it is all we have or ever will. We're all alone, together.

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