Utopian Moment - Pale Blue Dot

“We have not been given the lead in the cosmic drama.”

When I was kid during the early 1980s I used to watch a strange American man front a TV series called The Cosmos. It had dodgy special effects (by today’s standards anyway) and was fronted by an eloquent scientist sitting back on a leather seat in a mock space ship, taking us on a journey through the history of the universe. (This is all from memory so it may not have appeared like that at all!) I watched this series - indeed I had no choice – with my Da; we only had one television set and it was located in the warmest room. Da would arrive home from working all day and this particular programme, along with others such as Life On Earth, had been pencilled in for my Da. Soaps, sitcoms and other such frivolities would be disregarded on such nights. Da worked hard, earned a crust, and deserved his little nuggets of intellectual stimulation.

My Da was the sort of old fashioned working class bloke who had an enormous thirst for knowledge, but without any time or avenues to explore his learning in a significant manner – i.e colleges or any formal institutions. He was working long hours in a factory most days and, when freed from his daily grind, if he didn’t pop out for a couple of pints or watch an interesting and informative TV programme, he would take himself off armed with a book and spend his spare time reading.

The television programme I sat down to watch with my Da all those years ago was introduced and written by Carl Sagan. I didn’t understand much of what was being expounded by the cheerful and knowledgeable presenter, but I was repeatedly fed regurgitated facts, ironies and curios by my Da at certain points during the programme.

Anyway this is a long-winded way of saying that at long last I have belatedly picked up Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot. I bought it several years ago when I looked at my bookshelves and concluded that my scientific knowledge was inadequately catered for. I like to learn something new or at least something interesting on a regular basis and find many of the blogs and sites I visit on the web are always filling me with new information or perspectives. But they is no substitute to sitting and reading a good book about a subject you know little about.




Whenever I begin to despair or feel downhearted or stressed I close my eyes and think of myself looking back on the earth from the moon. (See above) This gives perspective to the problems and worries I may feel. Indeed, Sagan in his text brings up this idea of viewing the world from this perspective, (the iconic image taken by the Apollo 17 astronauts) and the change in human consciousness it can engender:

“…there is no sign of humans in this picture, not our reworking of the Earth's surface, not our machines, not ourselves: We are too small and our statecraft is too feeble to be seen by a spacecraft between the Earth and the Moon. From this vantage point, our obsession with nationalism is nowhere in evidence… On the scale of worlds—to say nothing of stars or galaxies—humans are inconsequential, a thin film of life on an obscure and solitary lump of rock and metal.”

In a way Sagan has given me leeway to go even further when I close my eyes. In Chapter Two and Three of the text he explains how we are a mere mote of dust, the eponymous blue dot. When the pictures from Voyager, taken at the very edge of our solar system 3.7 billion miles away from Earth, were beamed back to earth in 1990, they showed how inconsequential we are in our solar system, never mind the universe. Sagan reminds us to:



“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?”

In some ways Sagan utters many liberal and universal pieties. And he does not give us an economic analysis – but that is not his quest. Yet what is clear is that without internationalism, how are we to address the most serious environmental and social issues affecting the globe today? Reading this text (so far I’ve reached Chapter 4) reminds me, if not explicitly, then implicitly, that all of this - the border guards, the racial and sexual divisions, the entrenched political divisions, the reliance to the point of servitude on the cult of money, the petty chauvinisms, the enforced scarcity of resources in some parts of the world, the over production of resources in other parts of the world – all of this, is the work of humanity. God has not punished and elevated one population above another; there are no elect and no reprobate. Humanity has created the divisions and the religions, and humanity can dismantle them too. Whether or not we have given ourselves enough time to makes this transformation a reality is in doubt. The longer we allow ourselves to be lead, either willingly or unwillingly, by the forces of international capital, by the whims of hedge fund managers and multinational CEOs, by imperial democrats and God-inspired fanatics, the more our chances of escaping environmental catastrophe decrease. As Sagan adds:

“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.”