A Four Billion Mile Selfie

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.  –  Carl Sagan

“…. a mote of dust suspended on a sunbeam.” What a stunningly poetic phrase employed there by Sagan, and truth be told, I believe when viewed within its proper context, his words are well beyond our ability to comprehend, certainly with regard to the mind-numbing logistics behind their inspiration. Just imagine for a moment the unimaginable journey that has played out between our knuckle dragging ancestors to our current domination of the planet; the catastrophes, plagues, famines, wars, and countless other calamities that smacked mankind in the mouth, but they still picked themselves up and kept moving. It’s impossible to take it all in….. yet we have this photograph to consider.

Since most are ill-disposed to consider our primate backstory, the full perspective fails to register as it should. Even if I were to set aside the three million years beginning with our Australopithecine cousins in order to keep this as simple as possible, and stick only to the past 20,000 years or so, the journey still feels incomprehensible.

Just imagine the path from our Stone Age brethren chiseling a rock into crude cutting stones in order to skin a deer. Now position that next to the robotic systems that we’ve built that can secure a billion transistors on top a computer chip the size of a postage stamp. The journey from there to here has been astounding, to say the least, yet very few people consider it with any depth, causing a blind spot that effectively keeps us from deeply appreciating what Goethe called, “the best part of man.” Of course, our failure is due to the speed of progress itself because we are all forced to incorporate new discoveries and technologies into our daily routines at an exponential rate. The pace has become so incessant that just considering the previous generation feels ancient in a peculiar way.

Take my grandfather’s generation for example, who grew up as a boy in the early 1900’s, barely more than a century ago, when there was no indoor plumbing, no hot water, no flushing toilets, no indoor electricity, no refrigerator, no electric oven, nor an indoor bath. Horse and carriage were still the only means to travel, while vaccines to combat Diphtheria, Tetanus, Measles, Mumps, Chickenpox and Polio were still several decades away.

So yeah, I fully understand why that “mote of dust’ doesn’t inspiring the knee-buckling awe that it should. I also suspect the sheer profusion of images plays a role in numbing our sense of amazement. After all, there are hundreds, if not thousands of photos of Nebula’s, Quasar’s, Dwarf stars, bizarre remnants of supernova’s, and vast galleries of distant Galaxies, all just a click away. And with all those marvels, our sense of “stunning” diminishes. Can we genuinely imagine the reaction that Galileo, Kepler, or Newton would experience at viewing the earth from the ISS. It would shatter their minds. But for us, old hands at such marvels, reality steps in to remind us that while all that is cool to look at, it’s still ‘out there’ and of no practical use to the life we have right here in front of us. There is just too much competition over our attention for them to hold our captivation.

But I will submit this photo is of a different order of magnitude.

The shot was taken by Voyager 1 on February 14^th, 1990, from a distance of 3.7 billion miles from Earth and it was Carl Sagan himself who suggested the idea, and even helped secure the approval from NASA officials to maneuver the spacecraft to look back over its shoulder, as it were.

It launched in 1977, when I was still a pimped faced teenager, and has spent the past 41 years traveling through the solar system gathering data about our cosmic neighborhood for scientist to pour through, but for me, and I imagine for all non-scientists, Voyager’s true gift has been the photos of our celestial siblings, seen up close and in stunning detail, from the polar ice caps on Mars, the storms on Jupiter, to the ethereal beauty of Neptune. Altogether, the images provided a sorely needed perspective for mankind to grasp the true splendor and utter uniqueness of our place among them.

Look again and feel that vulnerability, the earth just floating there in astonishing isolation and consider the delicate balance that first allowed life to form there, then to survive against all the mayhem nature has thrown against it, which necessarily leads to the age-old question…. How did this all began in the first place?

It’s a fundamental question that invites some clear-eyed reflection. Seriously, how could a giant rock hurling around the solar system produce sentient beings? Well, that’s where the waters muddy a bit, so allow me a moment to digress on the two distinct methodologies at play there.

The first arose around one hundred thousand of years ago with the rise of the first modern humans, who were simply trying to comprehend all the inexplicable phenomena they were subjected to, while using the only tool they had at their disposal, their imagination. And in their attempt to explain all the baffling mysteries around them, they surmised that some invisible hand must be at work. It was a simple case of cause and effect. They witnessed an effect and surmised its cause, and since no mortal could duplicate those effects, it could only have come from an all-powerful being utterly beyond their understanding.

How else could they have understood a violent thunderstorm that belched fire across the sky, or an earthquake that shook, to them, the whole earth. There were all manner of mysterious forces wreaking indiscriminate havoc on these people, and the only explanation that made any rational sense was that something very powerful was behind it all, therefore it had to be some sort of supernatural being, a God…and evidently, he could get angry. Then before you could shake a sorcerer’s staff at them, our ancestors developed supernatural explanations for all of it, followed by moral laws, doctrines, rituals, and dogmas, all established to appease God’s anger or court his favor. Soon countless variant and ever-expanding explanations were codified and sanctified in books reaching back thousands of years, with their influence still binding billions in their grasp here in the 21^st century.

Then slowly, another way of thinking began coming on-line, ignited during the 16^th century with Francis Bacon’s call for “inductive” reasoning, which aimed to study the actual evidence and surmise conclusions solely on that basis; to study the phenomena, not cower from it. Consequently, for the curious minded, studying the evidence quickly led to conclusions that flat-out rejected the supernatural explanations they had been sold, with Copernicus and his heliocentric model of the solar system being an early example.

Copernicus wasn’t the first to think in this way, but his discovery certainly marked the beginning of the end for imaginary explanations to things that were no longer mysteries. Using this new methodology, others soon joined in, albeit secretly, following the logical flow from observation to hypothesis to theory, and with it, the Scientific Method established itself and quickly proved its value. By simply taking one small step after another, science has allowed us to move away from cowering from the wraths of God(s) to discovering the laws of nature (physics). And when science looked back to our own beginning and considered all the evidence gathered thus far, it reasonably established that life very likely evolved from single cell bacteria from the froth created at the edge of the ocean about three plus billion years ago; pond scum, in other words.

So, when I consider that “Pale Blue Dot” and its backstory, the evidence is clear and overwhelming; the geological, biological, astronomical, and paleontological evidence emphatically debunk all the myths that we inherited from our ancestors. We were not created fully formed as we stand today from a handful of dust, the Earth is not a mere 6000 years old, Eve was not created from Adam’s rib, nor was there a worldwide flood, nor an Ark, nor a talking snake, nor a magic tree because those are all made up stories to explain what was not known at the time. If you were to pull together all the evidence for our supernatural origins and its ongoing maintenance of the world, all you will have are words written in books. There is simply no empirical, testable, or demonstratably evidence for any of it. If you take away the books, you take away the evidence. It really is that simple.

I digressed there a bit not to belittle religion or mock faith in general, but to underscore the epistemological gulf that exists between the two, because the downstream implications that flow from these two camps will create fundamentally different reflections on a life, which has consequently fostered a fair amount of confusion. For example, I understand perfectly well the appeal of a faithful life. It is not difficult to empathize with. All our innate desires for being loved and accepted into a family of believers and its larger community are all checked off. The brochure is nice, I get it, but the opinions directed toward those in the opposite direction are very often confused and misguided, if not wholly insulting. People of faith generally feel that non–believers like myself are living unfulfilled lives, and that without God and faith, life is a pointless farce, and in their confusion assume that we unbelievers, in our arrogance, simply don’t care.

Well….. that is profoundly wrong.

For my own part, I have no qualms accepting that this life is all there is and once I die, that will be the end of it, lights out, with no second act to follow. I will simply fade to black. Period. But that does not at all necessitate a nihilistic approach to life, but quite the contrary. Accepting that finality actually instills a sharper focus, a finer appreciation for the limited time that we do have. It is precisely due to accepting what will surely be the hard stop at my death, that I approach THIS life with all the awareness, appreciation, and grace that I have to offer it. Or as Thoreau beautifully put it in his opening chapter of “Waldon Pond”:

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

Just a few decades after Darwin published “On the Origin of Species” in 1854, Nietzsche spoke harshly about its ominous implication of man’s true lineage, and scientific progress in general when he asserted the “unbroken progress in the self-belittling of man” and bemoans the loss of “man’s belief in his dignity, his uniqueness, and his irreplaceability in the scheme of existence.”

I will give Nietzsche some wiggle room there for at the time the evidence was still reasonably subjective and its implications so un-nerving to the 19^th century mind that some disorientation is to be expected. Yet his reservations are the same many cling to today, with most doubling down against even the clearest evidence available. For myself though, I will follow Carl Sagan’s lead when he wrote in ‘The Demon Haunted World’’.

“For me it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring. Which attitude is better geared for our long-term survival? Which gives us more leverage on our future? And if our naïve self-confidence is a little undermined in the process, is that altogether such a loss? Is there not cause to welcome it as a maturing and character-building experience?”.

So, forget for a moment the three billion years it took to get from a single cell organism to a 20-ton Brontosaurus, let’s just consider the journey it took our pre-human cousins on the African savannah, foraging for food some two or three million years ago. Primates who, without a spoken language, or anything resembling higher reasoning skills, survived, and multiplied in an environment that left no room for error. We were, after all, still very much a part of the food chain in those early days.

Now consider the quantum leap it took from those thick browed ancestors to the building of the Great Pyramid of Giza, built some 4500 years ago, a structure so massive that it contains two million individual stones, each weighing roughly 4000 lbs., with each stone chiseled and placed so precisely that a knife cannot be placed between them. Beyond that marvel, consider the King’s interior chamber, which was built with massive supporting stones of granite that weigh between 25 and 80 tons each and were transported to the site from a quarry 500 miles away, then raised and positioned nearly two hundred feet above ground level. Stop and consider that for a moment.

Still not impressed? Then let’s jump to, say Newton, who as we all know defined gravity; the invisible force that no one before him could even remotely explain. Incredibly, he understood that whatever force caused that apple to fall in his yard was the same force that held the planets in their orbits, which was an astounding intuition, yet he did far more than simply surmise that relationship, he explained it with such mathematical precision, inventing Calculus along the way, that three centuries later NASA used those calculations to measure the precise level of gravity the Apollo astronauts would experience while walking on the moon, as well as the altitude the LEM capsule needed to achieve above the surface in order to hold a comfortable orbit while waiting for the astronauts below.

In one final fit of ‘pond scum’ inspiration, this time considering the aesthetic realm, just imagine the nuance and touch required for Da Vinci to capture that faint whimsical smile of his Mona Lisa, or how a hammer and chisel in the hands of Michelangelo turned a block of marble into the stunning ‘Pieta’, or think of Beethoven writing his stirring 9^th Symphony as a final exhortation to his love and joy for life when he was unable to even hear the notes he wrote, composing it purely from the memory of their sounds.

I could easily reel off countless examples, illuminating one after another, all showcasing our incredible march forward, but I want to circle back to that photo for a moment and the story that screams from it, because our current view of the future could not have been imagined by any previous epoch. The progress has been painfully slow at times, with missteps taken all along the way, yet Tyrants and Kings have given way to democracies and equality. Squalor and feudalism have given way to economic theory and courts of justice. Science has given us vaccines that have saved millions from curable diseases. We’ve progressed from tribal drums pounding in the jungles to Symphonies played in exquisite concert halls, from cave paintings to Dali.

We’ve even progressed to the point of sending a spacecraft on an adventure through the solar system, and through a command of software code sent through the vacuum of space at the speed of light, warmed up its camera, spun around, all in order to snap a selfie of us back home. And all of it, every last bit of it, began from the froth at the edge of a pond.

You can count me as a proud descendent.