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Pale Blue Dot

A little more than science. Or philosophy. Or rather of philosophy derived from science. Following the comment in an entry book Carl Sagan "The Demon-Haunted World" , Esti my partner sent me a text which makes American scientist synopsis, or summarizing another of his books entitled " Pale Blue Dot ".

The book is based on a photograph (it seems that at the request of Sagan himself) the spacecraft Voyager 1 brought to Earth from 6,000 million miles away, where you can see our planet as a tiny practically insignificant blue dot in the vastness of the universe.

Photography "Pale Blue Dot" taken by the Voyager 1 - NASA

This circumstance is used by Sagan as a starting point to shape a perspective on the place of humans in the universe and hence on the relevancy of our behaviors, ideologies and customs. As I asked in the post about Aristarchus of Samos and helicentrismo, are we really so important? Perhaps the answer is simply yes. Or maybe it's not. It is virtually the mystery of life, and surely this is we end up without knowing the solution, but at least we would all do well in planteárnoslo.

I leave the text that referred to the principle:

"Look at that point. That's here. That's home. That's us. It is everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone one they ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, 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 shaft of sunlight.

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 triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a point. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our positions, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have a 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.

Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is no other place, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, yet no. Like it or not, at this moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character building. 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 treat each other more kindly, and to preserve the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known. "