Many of the debates in the history of science seem to be, at least in part contests over which humans are special.
Too many it still seems fitting that because of an accident of birth, our group (whichever that is) should have a central position on the social universe How seriously do you take their claim?ĥ billion years from now, after it is burned to a crisp or swallowed by the sun, there will be other worlds and stars and galaxies into being and they will know nothing of the Earth. They too cherish the notion of a God who has created everything for their benefit. Imagine it to be inhabited by a different form of intelligent life. If this doesn’t strike you as unlikely, then pick another dot.
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. Then try and convince yourself that God created the world for one of the 10 million species of life that inhabit that speck of dust. Think of that pale blue dot from this vantage point. The pictures convey to multitudes something very well known to astronomers, on the scale of the worlds – to say nothing of the stars or galaxies – humans are inconsequential, a thin film of life on an obscure and solitary lump of rock and metal. From here, our obsession with nationalism is nowhere in evidence. From the perspective of this image, there is no signs of humans, not the remaking of the Earth’s surface, not our machines, not ourselves. It took 5.5 hours travelling at the speed of light to reach us. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.”Ī spacecraft in Early 1990 took a picture of Earth 3.7 billion miles away from Earth. “Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. It seriously puts our Earth into perspective and shows us that really, in the grand scheme of things, we’re not that important. This offering ‘Pale Blue Dot’ from Carl Sagan, an astronomer, cosmologist, astrophysicist, and astrobiologist who popularised science takes us on a journey of space exploration.
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