Pale Blue Dot - Carl Sagan [146]
The pioneering psychologist William James called religion a “feeling of being at home in the Universe.” Our tendency has been, as I described in the early chapters of this book, to pretend that the Universe is how we wish our home would be, rather than to revise our notion of what’s homey so it embraces the Universe. If, in considering James’ definition, we mean the real Universe, then we have no true religion yet. That is for another time, when the sting of the Great Demotions is well behind us, when we are acclimatized to other worlds and they to us, when we are spreading outward to the stars.
The Cosmos extends, for all practical purposes, forever. After a brief sedentary hiatus, we are resuming our ancient nomadic way of life. Our remote descendants, safely arrayed on many worlds through the Solar System and beyond, will be unified by their common heritage, by their regard for their home planet, and by the knowledge that, whatever other life may be, the only humans in all the Universe come from Earth.
They will gaze up and strain to find the blue dot in their skies. They will love it no less for its obscurity and fragility. They will marvel at how vulnerable the repository of all our potential once was, how perilous our infancy, how humble our beginnings, how many rivers we had to cross before we found our way.
*Even if we are not in any particular hurry, we may be able by then to make small worlds move faster than we can make spacecraft move today. If so, our descendants will eventually overtake the two Voyager spacecraft—launched in the remote twentieth century—before they leave the Oort Cloud, before they make for interstellar space. Perhaps they will retrieve these derelict ships of long ago. Or perhaps they will permit them to sail on.
*A value that nicely approximates modern estimates of the number of planets orbiting stars in the Milky Way Galaxy.
*Most of it may be in “nonbaryonic” matter, not made of our familiar protons and neutrons, and not anti-matter either. Over 90 percent of the mass of the Universe seems to be in this dark, quintessential, deeply mysterious stuff wholly unknown on Earth. Perhaps we will one day not only understand it, but also find a use for it.
REFERENCES
(a few citations and suggestions for further reading)
PLANETARY EXPLORATION IN GENERAL:
J. Kelly Beatty and Andrew Chaiken, editors, The New Solar System, third edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
Eric Chaisson and Steve McMillan, Astronomy Today (Englewood Cliffs, NT: Prentice Hall, 1993).
Esther C. Goddard, editor, The Papers of Robert H. Goddard (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970) (three volumes).
Ronald Greeley, Planetary Landscapes, second edition (New York: Chapman and Hall, 1994).
William J. Kaufmann III, Universe, fourth edition (New York: W. H. Freeman, 1993).
Harry Y. McSween, Jr., Stardust to Planets (New York: St. Martin’s, 1994).
Ron Miller and William K. Hartmann, The Grand Tour: A Traveler’s Guide to the Solar System, revised edition (New York: Workman, 1993).
David Morrison, Exploring Planetary Worlds (New York: Scientific American Books, 1993).
Bruce C. Murray, Journey to the Planets (New York: W.W. Norton, 1989).
Jay M. Pasachoff, Astronomy: From Earth to the Universe (New York: Saunders, 1993).
Carl Sagan, Cosmos (New York: Random House, 1980).
Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, The Call of the Cosmos (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1960) (English translation).
CHAPTER 3, THE GREAT DEMOTIONS
John D. Barron and Frank J. Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
A. Linde, Particle Physics and Inflationary Cosmology (Harwood Academy Publishers, 1991).
B. Stewart, “Science or Animism?,” Creation/Evolution, vol. 12, no. 1 (1992), pp. 18