Pale blue dot

Kijk eens goed naar deze foto. Zie je dat kleine stipje rechtsboven, in die bruine streep? Zo ziet onze aarde eruit vanop 6 miljard kilometer. Ze is niet meer dan een stofje in een enorme leegte.

Gisteren plaatste Toomas een filmpje op zijn blog dat hierover gaat. Astronoom Carl Sagan vertelt daarin over zijn idee om in 1990 met de Voyager 1 even achteruit te kijken en een foto van onze aarde te nemen. Het resultaat zie je dus hierboven. Bij het zien van die foto schreef Sagan een tekst, die tot in de eeuwigheid bewaard moet worden omdat hij zo prachtig is...Hier komt hij.

Ik weet het. Het ziet er zo'n lange tekst uit. En zonder prentjes. En in het Engels dan nog. Buuh. Maar lees hem gewoon, je zal nadien tevreden zijn dat je het gedaan hebt.

"Consider again 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, 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 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 the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. 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 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 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.