When the Hubble Space Telescope pointed at one of the darkest regions
in the space known at that time, it found thousands and thousands of
galaxies. Let the thought sink in for a bit - we pointed at the darkest
area in the sky and yet we found it was full of stars, planets and
likely some type of life-forms. If anyone needs a lesson in humility
this picture is all one needs to see.
Hubble Ultra Deep Field
Image
Dr. Tyson famously once said:
The Universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.
When things go wrong, there is no point in asking to oneself - “Why
did this happen to me?”, “What did I do to deserve this?”. The Universe
is so vast that our brain can’t even quantify how big it is, in such
vastness there is no reason to expect that we are (or I am) somehow
important.
Nobody said this better than Dr. Sagan, when he described the Earth’s
image captured by Voyager:
The Pale Blue Dot
Look again at 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.
