Door David Javerbaum (The Tweet of God)
Whenever the daily stresses of life feel on the verge of sending me hurtling down a pit of existential despair – as they increasingly do – I call up to my mind, and laptop screen, the image of the Pale Blue Dot.
Some of you may know the story: In February 1990, a decade after the Voyager 1 spacecraft had completed its flyby of Saturn and was leaving the confines of the solar system, the late great astronomer Carl Sagan asked to have it turned back around to face the sun to take a picture that might help put our place in the universe in perspective.
Sagan wrote movingly of this image:
From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again 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.
I have turned to this image, and Sagan’s words, time and time again in my life, because for me they put my existence, and existence in general, into crystal-clear perspective: We are tiny, insignificant creatures, living with eight billion other tiny, insignificant creatures, on an infinitesimal, insignificant planet.
So we need to fight each other for every square inch of it.
Because Sagan is right. Earth, as small as it is, is all we have; and the share we each get as individuals and nations is minuscule enough without having to divvy it up among other people, or nations, or religions, or ethnicities, or cultures, or value systems, or even our friends and neighbors, who, though they seem to mean well, are competing for the same resources you are, and know it, and would just as soon stab you as buy you a beer.
We do indeed live on “a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam”, and divided equally, that means each of us owns one eight-billionth of that mote; but clearly one four-billionth would be twice as good, one-billionth even better, and a millionth would be amazing, and mean we have a greater share of the planet than most people, and are therefore winning, although not in comparison to the people who have more than a millionth, to whom we are losing.
I gaze at the Pale Blue Dot and I understand what Sagan was saying. Look at the picture. We’re in the middle of cosmic nowhere. There’s no reason to think extraterrestrials will ever find us in the infinity of space. No advanced form of sentient life is going to be coming down any time soon to tell us who should own Greenland, or Ukraine, or Kashmir, or Western Sahara, or any of the dozens of other mote-lets whose ownership is disputed. No, we are on our own. We will have to fight our own wars of conquest against each other, and determine our own winners and losers, and in some cases even work together, if such an alliance proves useful in defeating a common foe. When I see Israelis and Palestinians fighting over an area of land small even by Earth standards, I don’t condemn either side. To the contrary, I laud them. It makes me glad to know there’s at least one small part of our planet where people understand the need to desperately fight over a small part of our planet, where they know that’s exactly what people, in the grand scheme of things, were put here to do.
And now we’re beginning to feel the effects of climate change, the life-threatening crisis brought about by a century of industrialization. Sagan died before its effects began to be truly felt, but I feel confident if he were still here, he would urge us to use the last bit of time before our extinction to engage in one last global military free-for-all. This is the one home we will ever have, and we have destroyed it, and as history draws to a close it is time for us all to work together to fight each other and determine Earth’s Ultimate Champion. (And remember, if nuclear weapons blow up all but a tiny fraction of Earth, the people who own that tiny fraction would be the victors.)
I hope some of you are inspired by this essay to take a first, second or hundredth look at the transcendent image of the Pale Blue Dot. Perhaps it will become a lodestar for your soul as it has for mine. I’m sure if it does, Carl, who is currently in heaven with God and Jesus Christ, would be grateful. I’ll leave the last word to him:
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. It’s really awesome!
SB: Ik vond dit stukje op de internetsite van God zelf. Ik vond het een mooi stuk. Als ik binnenkort tijd heb zal ik me eens aan een vertaling wagen.
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