Pale Blue Dot | Carl Sagan 💛
[Remembering a legend on his birthday today!]
Yes! He’s taught us some real, life-lessons - that are above and beyond the ‘earthy!’
14 February 1990!
A memorable day for humankind for any many reasons!
At Carl Sagan’s suggestion, one of earth’s most memorable images was taken by Voyager 1.
Well, as we all know, NASA launched the Voyager spacecraft (Voyager 1 & 2) way back in the year 1977, to probe the outer reaches of our solar system!
And interestingly, even today, the Voyager sincerely and meticulously continues to probe on and on and on!
Coming back,
As the invincible Voyager spacecraft was departing our planet veering towards the other pockets of our solar system, it stopped and turned around!
Yes!
For that one last look!
For that one last look of its home!
Its home sweet home!
Its home-planet, our earth!
And that ‘one last look’ had its fair share of lubtub moments as well!
That’s because Voyager was cruising at a distance of almost four billion miles away, whizzing past our solar system at such breakneck speed, and its cameras were slowly shutting down!
So there was just one last chance!
To Candy Handsen (who helped in meticulously planning out on this historic photo shot), this was a kinda ‘now or never’ moment!
And just thirty-four minutes after capturing its home planet Earth, Voyager’s cameras turned off – forever!
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| The Pale Blue Dot 🔵 |
A book that sure needs to be on the ‘must-read’ list of all of us human beings on this lovely planet, I guess!
Without divulging much from the cream and the content of this must-read book, let me give some real memorable lines as takeaways –
Here goes Carl Sagan –
But tell me, who are they, these wanderers . . .?
- RAINER MARIA RILKE, “THE FIFTH ELEGY” (1923)
Begins Carl Sagan’s favourite quote to his awe-inspiring book titled, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, that’s got us all fascinated for close to three decades now!
One is spontaneously reminded of Bill Bryson and Desmond Morris while scouring through those plain, simple and lucid words and sentences, coming from such a great planetary scientist cum cosmologist cum astronomer cum astrophysicist - words devoid of any ‘scientific’ jargon – that make this book such a highly engaging read!
Sample the opening lines –
We were wanderers from the beginning. We knew every stand of tree for a hundred miles. When the fruits or nuts were ripe, we were there. We followed the herds in their annual migrations...
Working together, we protected our children from the lions and the hyenas. We taught them the skills they would need...
And then he proceeds, in like fashion, in such lucid prose,
In the last few decades, the United States and the former Soviet Union have accomplished something stunning and historic - the close-up examination of all those points of light, from Mercury to Saturn, that moved our ancestors to wonder and to science.
Since the advent of successful interplanetary flight in 1962, our machines have flown by, orbited, or landed on more than seventy new worlds.
We have wandered among the wanderers.
During the Viking robotic mission, beginning in July 1976, in a certain sense I spent a year on Mars.
I examined the boulders and sand dunes, the sky red even at high noon, the ancient river valleys, the soaring volcanic mountains, the fierce wind erosion, the laminated polar terrain, the two dark potato-shaped moons.
But there was no life - not a cricket or a blade of grass, or even, so far as we can tell for sure, a microbe.
These worlds have not been graced, as ours has, by life.
Life is a comparative rarity.
You can survey dozens of worlds and find that on only one of them does life arise and evolve and persist.
In our time we’ve crossed the Solar System and sent four ships to the stars.
Neptune lies a million times farther from Earth than New York City is from the banks of the Bug.
But there are no distant relatives, no humans, and apparently no life waiting for us on those other worlds.
No letters conveyed by recent émigrés help us to understand the new land - only digital data transmitted at the speed of light by unfeeling, precise robot emissaries.
They tell us that these new worlds are not much like home.
But we continue to search for inhabitants.
We can’t help it.
Life looks for life.
Then he clearly outlines the purpose of the book in such simple terms.
Says Sagan, Carl Sagan -
That’s what this book is about: other worlds, what awaits us on them, what they tell us about ourselves, and - given the urgent problems our species now faces - whether it makes sense to go. Should we solve those problems first? Or are they a reason for going?
Pale Blue Dot is about a new recognition…
says Sagan!
Some lovely excerpts from Chapter 1, titled, ‘You are HERE’
The spacecraft was a long way from home, beyond the orbit of the outermost planet and high above the ecliptic plane.
The ship was speeding away from the Sun at 40,000 miles per hour. But in early February of 1990, it was overtaken by an urgent message from Earth.
Obediently, it turned its cameras back toward the now-distant planets.
Slewing its scan platform from one spot in the sky to another, it snapped 60 pictures and stored them in digital form on its tape recorder.
Then, slowly, in March, April, and May, it radioed the data back to Earth.
Each image was composed of 640,000 individual picture elements (“pixels”), like the dots in a newspaper wire-photo or a pointillist painting.
And yet there is no sign of humans in this picture, not our reworking of the Earth’s surface, not our machines, not ourselves:
We are too small and our statecraft is too feeble to be seen by a spacecraft between the Earth and the Moon.
From this vantage point, our obsession with nationalism is nowhere in evidence.
On the scale of worlds - to say nothing of stars or galaxies - humans are inconsequential, a thin film of life on an obscure and solitary lump of rock and metal.
It seemed to me that another picture of the Earth, this one taken from a hundred thousand times farther away, might help in the continuing process of revealing to ourselves our true circumstance and condition.
It had been well understood by the scientists and philosophers of classical antiquity that the Earth was a mere point in a vast encompassing Cosmos, but no one had ever seen it as such. Here was our first chance!
Look again at that dot.
That’s here. That’s home. That’s us.
On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you 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 of civilization, ever king and peasant, every young couple in love, every moth 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 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 triumph, they could become momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
Think of the endless visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, 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.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbour life.
There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate.
Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience.
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 with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known!
says Sagan, Carl Sagan!
How true!
And well, in this context, me thought it would be so apt and meet to quote a line from Ms. Vinisha Umashankar, who hogged the limelight and made us all proud, at the UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, this past Wednesday.
In the context of Climate Change - that needs immediate corrective measures and urgent attention from all nations across the world - she said,
I’m not just a girl from India. I’m a girl from Earth and I’m proud to be so.
From the Sagan saga above, this lovely little line makes much-o-much sense! ain’t it?
Earthlings!
Or in other words,
Planetariats!
image courtesy: bbcdotcom & linkedindotcom (Ms.Vinisha)