Pale Blue Dot - Carl Sagan [8]
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor 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.
CHAPTER 2
ABERRATIONS OF LIGHT
If man were taken away from the world, the rest would seem to be all astray,
without aim or purpose … and to be leading to nothing.
—FRANCIS BACON, WISDOM OF THE ANCIENTS (1619)
Ann Druyan suggests an experiment: Look back again at the pale blue dot of the preceding chapter. Take a good long look at it. Stare at the dot for any length of time and then try to convince yourself that God created the whole Universe for one of the 10 million or so species of life that inhabit that speck of dust. Now take it a step further: Imagine that everything was made just for a single shade of that species, or gender, or ethnic or religious subdivision. If this doesn’t strike you as unlikely, pick another dot. Imagine it to be inhabited by a different form of intelligent life. They, too, cherish the notion of a God who has created everything for their benefit. How seriously do you take their claim?
“SEE THAT STAR?”
“You mean the bright red one?” his daughter asks in return.
“Yes. You know, it might not be there anymore. It might be gone by now—exploded or something. Its light is still crossing space, just reaching our eyes now. But we don’t see it as it is. We see it as it was.”
Many people experience a stirring sense of wonder when they first confront this simple truth. Why? Why should it be so compelling? On our little world light travels, for all practical purposes, instantaneously. If a lightbulb is glowing, then of course it’s physically where we see it, shining away. We reach out our hand and touch it: It’s there all right, and unpleasantly hot. If the filament fails, then the light goes out. We don’t see it in the same place, glowing, illuminating the room years after the bulb breaks and it’s removed from its socket. The very notion seems nonsensical. But if we’re far enough away, an entire sun can go out and we’ll continue to see it shining brightly; we won’t learn of its death, it may be, for ages to come—in fact, for how long it takes light, which travels fast but not infinitely fast, to cross the intervening vastness.
The immense distances to the stars and the galaxies mean that we see everything in space in the past—some as they were before the Earth came to be. Telescopes are time machines. Long ago, when an early galaxy began to pour light out into the surrounding darkness, no witness could have known that billions of years later some remote clumps of rock and metal, ice and organic molecules would fall together to make a place called Earth; or that life would arise and thinking beings evolve who would one day capture a little of that galactic light, and try to puzzle out what had sent it on its way.
And after the Earth dies, some 5 billion years from now, after it is burned to a crisp or even swallowed by the Sun, there will be other worlds and stars and galaxies coming into being—and they will know nothing of a place once called Earth.
IT ALMOST NEVER FEELS like prejudice. Instead, it seems fitting and just—the idea that, because of an accident of birth, our group (whichever one it is) should have a central position in the social universe. Among Pharaonic princelings and Plantagenet pretenders, children of robber barons and Central Committee bureaucrats, street gangs and conquerors of nations, members of confident majorities, obscure sects, and reviled minorities, this self-serving