Pale Blue Dot

I miss Carl Sagan (1934-96). I used to read his books as soon as they appeared--well, the ones  he wrote for a "general reader" like me; I didn't exactly major in astrophysics. I enjoyed seeing him on talk shows (Johnny Carson had him on a lot, as I recall--more than two dozen times says a trusty website--link to it). I watched and learned so much from Cosmos, a thirteen-episode series he did on PBS in late 1980.

In the summer of 2001 I read his novel, Contact (1985), as I was preparing to return to teaching at Western Reserve Academy. (I had retired from public school in 1997.) The entire school population was going to read the novel--though I don't recall that we really did much with the book during the year.

my copy

And then Carl Sagan was gone. Pneumonia, a result of a battle with a terminal bone-marrow disease.

One of his books that I most enjoyed--and was even occasionally stunned by--was The Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994).

my copy

In that book--early on--is a picture that stuns me to this day. It's a photograph taken by Voyager, far out in the massive emptiness of space. And if you look carefully toward the upper right corner of this image, you will see the "pale blue dot." Planet earth.

I used to show my WRA students this photo, but as I sit here, I cannot for the life of me remember why. Some related literary passage we were discussing? Some writing assignment? Beats me.

What stuns me about this photograph, of course, is our tiny presence in the vastness--the darkness--of space. Here we all are, on this tiny blue ball, spinning around in the black. And what have we been doing? Hating one another, killing one another, damaging (destroying?) the atmosphere, plundering the planet, acting as if our personal concerns are so freaking important.

We've lost perspective--if we ever really had much of it.

That photograph should remind us that we're all here together, that our dot of a home is fragile, that we need one another, that we need to commit to learning how to live in peace (and gratitude) with people who aren't like us, how to protect our pale blue dot before our greed and ignorance make it uninhabitable.

Carl Sagan reminded us of such things--over and over he spoke of them. We need to attend to his echoes.