The Pale Blue Dot

The Pale Blue Dot.

As Carl Sagan wrote, "We succeeded in taking a picture of earth from deep space 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 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 star spectacled cyclorama.

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 posturing, 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. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world.”

Excerpt from a commencement address delivered May 11, 1996. Dr. Sagan's book Pale Blue Dot .

No help will come, let us not be coy, there is no need to rest on protocol, let’s name names. After the Japanese whaling fleets have successfully wiped out all the Minke whales from the worlds oceans, purely for scientific purposes you must understand, when the Malaysian loggers have managed to strip the worlds forests bare from Sumatra through to the Amazon Basin.

Maybe when the Indonesians stop mindlessly setting their country alight in yearly preparation for another years planting of crops causing the resulting smoke to cloud the skies of their cities and towns to spread as far as their neighbouring countries and causing millions of tons of carbon dioxide to rise and heat up this pale blue dot.

The drugs lords from Columbia and Burma stop killing the blue dots inhabitants or managing to send a large percentage of its population in a hypnotic daze from hawking happy dust to its people, and the masses of starving humanity over-populating this pale blue dot without any due regard to the this small planets sustainability.

Rich countries who refuse to sign the Kyoto agreement because of the possibility of affecting their countries economic growth. Indonesian fishermen who have depleted their own fish stocks and now resort to trawl illegally in other counties waters just to remove fins from sharks.

The mindless decimation of much of our fauna or to drain the bile from living bears because it is supposed to be an aphrodisiac and will heighten the sexual cravings of superstitious aging Oriental males, the list is endless. Sagan was right “There is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

I am informed from the day I am born I can watch the Chinese people march past me and I will never see the end of the line in my lifetime because of their current numbers. I now read that this is claim to fame is about to be over-taken in the not too distant future by India because of their breeding rates which are beyond comprehension.

If the Indians can do that to their own large country what hope has England got for any sort of future. But who cares. The government doesn’t appear to; they refuse to admit a looming problem exists. They cannot or will not see the big picture it interferes with their plans for a vast globalised consumer market, but eventually well past their lifetimes their descendants are going to pay a very high price indeed for their uncaring selfish greed.

So what is the future for this pale blue dot hanging inconspicuously against a velvet ebon backdrop, what will happen to its peoples, its animals, its birds, its giants of the sea and the hopes and fears of the children left on a dying planet caused by their ancestor’s greed and self interests?

Unknowingly we could be the only planet amongst the entire multiple universes that a greater being planned as the great experiment. As regards other extra terrestrial intelligence? Maybe they don’t exist, who knows? Maybe we really are one of a unique kind, and we blew it!

Who will come and help us? We appear not to be able to help ourselves. But judgement day could be much sooner than we think, because our ills are rising exponentially and very rapidly, we won’t get a second chance.

We must also ask ourselves, do we really care about our planet our people our children and the continuance of this great experiment? We all chorus, yes of course we do, but we are seeing very little pressure put on governments in an effort to stop the heating up of this pale blue dot before it turns grey and dies.