I love nothing more than having my assumptions demolished. I enjoy being put in my place. This is not some masochistic desire to be debased or humiliated. Rather, I find it liberating to see how small we really are in the cosmos, via images of space and all kinds of beginner-friendly astronomical analyses. It was the writer Carl Sagan who put it best on 13 October 1994. When giving a speech at Cornell University he mentioned the Pale Blue Dot photo, taken by the Voyager 1 space probe on 14 February 1990, 6 billion kilometres from Earth. Earth appears as a tiny, almost indiscernible speck on the image against the vastness of space. Sagan’s profound words are worth quoting in full:
“We succeeded in taking that picture, 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.
“[…] 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.”
I’m sure you have worldly and spiritual concerns. I do too. And I don’t believe we should give up on what we care about on this beautiful little planet, nor cease to take care of ourselves or enjoy the pleasures that this life has to offer as long as they don’t harm others. We should do all that—marvelling and exulting, in the meantime, that we are able to consciously reflect upon ourselves that we are part of this inconceivable, mind-boggling, sublime organism of reality called the Universe. If what we do, feel, and believe is seen from this perspective, our steps will surely feel a bit lighter, our minds a bit more open to humour and letting go. Now how’s that for context!