"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 (1994)
Carl Sagan asked to direct Voyager I's camera to face our home in 1990. He discussed it multiple times, including in a lecture at Cornell as well as on Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. He then was inspired to write a book, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space.
This image, as well as his "15 billion years" quote have put the human experience into an intriguing perspective. Everything we know of is made up of the same "stuff" and follows the same "rules". These simple, fundamental beginnings, after about 13.8 billion years, have become too complex for the human mind to even begin to comprehend (hence, the title of this blog). I prefer to think of whatever This is (life, the Universe, the Multiverse, Existence, etc.) as a sandbox or garden. Many are trying to find the meaning of it all. As an existentialist, I believe we create meaning from an inherently meaningless Existence. Using the same "stuff" and "rules" that govern the rest of known existence, we must build our future, whether that be to make our mark on existence, or to make it a better place for as many sapiens as possible.
