Reflections on a Mote of Dust -- Carl Sagan (1934-1996)

This classic photograph of the Earth was taken on December 7, 1972. The original caption is reprinted below:

View of the Earth as seen by the Apollo 17 crew traveling toward the moon. This translunar coast photograph extends from the Mediterranean Sea area to the Antarctica south polar ice cap. This is the first time the Apollo trajectory made it possible to photograph the south polar ice cap. Note the heavy cloud cover in the Southern Hemisphere. Almost the entire coastline of Africa is clearly visible. The Arabian Peninsula can be seen at the northeastern edge of Africa. The large island off the coast of Africa is the Malagasy Republic. The Asian mainland is on the horizon toward the northeast.

'We succeeded in taking that picture [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, 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 sunbeam.

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 posturings, 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. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known'

Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot

The image is from Voyager 1 , 1990

Voyager 1 , launched on September 5 1977 is still traveling out there in the universe and is currently (in 2008) in the termination shock (The termination shock is the point in the heliosphere where the solar wind slows down to subsonic speed (with respect to the star) due to interactions with the local interstellar medium) of our Sun.

On it is the Golden Record, containing info about the Earth , Man, the diversity of the human cultures, sounds images, languages and even some thoughts in binary format for any human or other civilizations listening out there.

Carl Sagan did not see this picture of the Earth as seen from Mars taken from Mars Global Surveyor in 2003. But he would have loved it!


So when I look up in the night sky and see the stars, when I'm in need of comfort, I think of us here, on a pale blue dot........all of the human dreams and beauty and art and .... everything that Humanity is......4.5 billion years for Earth to become what it has become.....that's quite a journey...Carl said everything much more eloquently than I ever could.....my soul is in those words above......

So the pair of eyes that stare into mine should share the same......

Oh f@ck me....

All I need to say is :

The universe was made on purpose, the circle said. In whatever galaxy
you happen to find yourself, you take the circumference of a circle,
divide it by its diameter, measure closely enough, and uncover a miracle
-- another circle, drawn kilometers downstream of the decimal point. There
would be richer messages farther in. It doesn't matter what you look like,
or what you're made of, or where you come from. As long as you live in
this universe, and have a modest talent for mathematics, sooner or later
you'll find it. It's already here. It's inside everything. You don't have
to leave your planet to find it. In the fabric of space and in the nature
of matter, as in a great work of art, there is, written small, the
artist's signature. Standing over humans, gods, and demons, subsuming
Caretakers and Tunnel builders, there is an intelligence that antedates
the universe. The circle had closed. She found what she had been searching
for."

Nothing more is needed!

Love, Agnosticism and numinous - Mysterium Tremendum

I'd love to write something really inspiring or insightful right now but the truth is....I'm too tired:-)

Didn't sleep last night and I'm at work, alone since its Easter holidays and all the rest are on vacations.

I was reading Contact again for the millionth probable time again and as always there was something more there for me to find. I particularly noticed the following passage describing Ellie's relationship with Ken :

" She was sometimes amazed at what she was able to do and say in his
presence, because of their love. She came to admire him so much that his
love for her affected her own self-esteem: She liked herself better
because of him. And since he clearly felt the same, there was a kind of
infinite regress of love and respect underlying their relationship. At
least, that was how she described it to herself. In the presence of so
many of her friends, she had felt an undercurrent of loneliness. With Ken,it was gone.

She was comfortable describing to him her reveries, snatches of
memories, childhood embarrassments. And he was not merely interested but
fascinated. He would question her for hours about her childhood. His
questions were always direct, sometimes probing, but without exception
gentle. she began to understand why lovers talk baby talk to one another.
There was no other socially acceptable circumstance in which the children
inside her were permitted to come out. If the on-year-old, the five-year-
old, the twelve-year-old, and the twenty-year-old all find compatible
personalities in the beloved, there is a real chance to keep all of these sub-personas happy. Love ends their long loneliness. Perhaps the depth of love can be calibrated by the number of different selves that are actively involved in a given relationship. With her previous partners, it seemed, at most one of these selves was able to find a compatible opposite number; the other personas were grumpy hangers-on. "

I have been looking for a way to describe this exact feeling for all past relationships, the good ones because the bad mostly do not make you feel good about yourself. And Carl Sagan does it amazingly in 2 paragraphs.

I do not think I have even encountered this person that all my different sub-personas can be happy with. I have always felt and still do that I need to be someone else and not who I actually am, because who I actually am is, truly, to hard to swallow.

I know this. I know what I am asking for is .... well.....at least my own equal if not more. And that, I know, is A LOT to ask for. And as Ellie says I am truly, honestly, most profoundly solitary in my world of 210 facebook friends. The circle of people I know is huge but I in it I cannot find someone to actually take all the burden of breaking into this solitude....

Now to do that of course he would have to be able to understand and appreciate that solitude for what it is and not try to rip it apart but gently stand beside it.

Being solitary...it is a choice you are driven to , a necessary choice that you cannot escape when you start evolving in a way uncommon to most people.

And it goes together with an enormous sense of compassion and love for humanity, with all its faults but all its wonderful dreams. As the Caretakers told Ellie it was Beethoven that gave them the hope in order to contact the human race.

All great works of art and of the mind for me inspire love and also a sense of the numinous, of misterium tremendum and so does science....for me. I do actually believe that the Andromeda Galaxy is as numinous as Botticelli's Venus, and possibly more.

I remember distinctly 2 separate occasions where I have experienced this sense of numinous......once in front of Monet's Venice (where for no apparent reason, while casually looking at the painting, my eyes watered, my chest felt as if it was going to explode and my mind was racing full of energy and hope and infinite sadness but also joy)

The other time I was alone, under a starlight sky without a moon, on a mountaintop in Pelio, gazing at the Milky Way. And as I stood and watched this sense of grandeur, this magestic, mysterium tremendum, filled my mind and my eyes and my legs faltered for a second and I braced myself full of joy and hope and - for only fragments of time - with my solitude lifted by something bigger than life.

The thing is....most of what I write about here are for most people mambo jumbo, waste of time etc etc. And for the rest , the very few rest, a very good way to insanity.

You see the vastness of space and the infinite of time can drive someone crazy when it is not accompanied with love. And it so seldom is.

Love makes the emptiness bearable. And I say love, not sex, not in love, no, pure unconditional love that says I love you for who you are, whatever you are, because you make my own perception of this delusional reality so much more beautiful and I want to make you happy in any way I can with no refunds because of who you are.

I would love to experience that.

Finishing I have to quote my beloved Carl Sagan again in what to me is the closest to religious experience I would ever hope to get :

" The Argus computer was so persistent and inventive in its attempts to
contact Eleanor Arroway that it almost conveyed an urgent personal need to
share the discovery.

The anomaly showed up most starkly in Base 11 arithmetic, where it
could be written out entirely as zeros and ones. Compared with what had
been received from Vega, this could be at best a simple message, but its
statistical significance was high. The program reassembled the digits into
a square raster, an equal number across and down. The first line was an
uninterrupted file of zeros, left to right. The second line showed a
single numeral one, exactly in the middle, with zeros to the borders, left
and right. After a few more lines, an unmistakable arc had formed,
composed of ones. The simple geometrical figure had been quickly
constructed, line by line, self-reflexive, rich with promise. The last
line of the figure emerged, all zeros except for a single centered one.
The subsequent line would be zeros only, part of the frame.

Hiding in the alternating patterns of digits, deep inside the
transcendental number, was a perfect circle, its form traced out by
unities in a field of noughts.

The universe was made on purpose, the circle said. In whatever galaxy
you happen to find yourself, you take the circumference of a circle,
divide it by its diameter, measure closely enough, and uncover a miracle
-- another circle, drawn kilometers downstream of the decimal point. There
would be richer messages farther in. It doesn't matter what you look like,
or what you're made of, or where you come from. As long as you live in
this universe, and have a modest talent for mathematics, sooner or later
you'll find it. It's already here. It's inside everything. You don't have
to leave your planet to find it. In the fabric of space and in the nature
of matter, as in a great work of art, there is, written small, the
artist's signature. Standing over humans, gods, and demons, subsuming
Caretakers and Tunnel builders, there is an intelligence that antedates
the universe. The circle had closed. She found what she had been searching
for."

People ask me why I call myself an agnostic and not an atheist, as if I do not hold the courage of my convictions. Still I consider myself a deeply spiritual person but...the data isn't in yet to formulate a meaningful answer. Carl Sagan said it, Asimov's Multivac said it and I say it......

And as for ever lasting love, I have to quote William Butler Yeats :

" You say there is no love, my love, Unless it lasts for aye. Ah, folly,
there are episodes Far better than the play."

Episodes, that makes us who we are , make us grow in our solitude in order to discover who we are to be able to reach the point where we come together with another person to protect and guard each other solitudes.

Hiroshima

Today is the 62nd anniversary of the Hiroshima catastrophe, the world's first nuclear attack.

And even though everything about this drama has been said and captured in print and film many times, even though it is an event that the younger do not remember or pay attention to I can only recall the words of Carl Sagan through the mouth of Contact's character Ellie Arroway :

(Ellie facing the committee that selects the Machine's passenger ):

Panel member: If you were to meet these Vegans, and were permitted only one question to ask of them, what would it be?
Ellie Arroway: Well, I suppose it would be, how did you do it? How did you evolve, how did you survive this technological adolescence without destroying yourself?

That is a good question that needs to be answered by our species.....will we ever get to answer it I wonder?

Our cosmos......

Explanation: M83 is one of the closest and brightest spiral galaxies on the sky. Visible with binoculars in the constellation of Hydra, majestic spiral arms have prompted its nickname as the Southern Pinwheel. Although discovered 250 years ago, only much later was it appreciated that M83 was not a nearby gas cloud, but a barred spiral galaxy much like our own Milky Way Galaxy. M83, pictured above in a photograph from a Very Large Telescope, is a prominent member of a group of galaxies that includes Centaurus A and NGC 5253, all of which lie about 15 million light years distant. To date, six supernova explosions have been recorded in M83. An intriguing double circumnuclear ring has been discovered at the center of M83.

P.S. http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/archivepix.html

a whole other universe is out there.....

I was watching an episode of Brothers & Sisters last night and one of the characters said :

"You don't love people because they are perfect.....you love them because they are"

And I don't know if it was the time (late at night) or the feeling or something but I found it expressing in just a few words perfectly what it would take me several pages to explain or express.

Because indeed we love people with their faults, we love them when they let us down, we love them when they are less than what we expected or hoped. But we love them......because they exist, they are. And that existence fills our lives, makes the emptiness bearable as Ellie's father says to her in Contact. The only thing that makes the emptiness bearable is each other.

For Carl

“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

Look at her. Isn't she the most beautiful sight your eyes were ever privileged to caress?

A, those Sunday nights......always with a sense of melancholy, never quite a holiday;) Have you ever noticed that even though Sunday is not a working day you're never in such a good mood as on a Saturday? Well its always like that for me.

Anyway, I was thinking about love...yeah a strange topic to be thinking about right? Well what I was thinking about was the ideal love, the one we read about in Romeo and Juliet, the one we see in paintings and listen to in countless songs and works of art.

For who can listen to Puccini's Nessun Dorma and not feel the composer genius in every single note? Who can hear Violeta sing 'Amami Alfredo' in La Traviata and not have chills going through his spine? I was fortunate enough to see a modern version of the opera Romeo and Juliet in the Opera House in Vienna, Juliet was in tight leather pants and a corset and Romeo was every woman's fantasy, however what was amazing, what swept me off my feet was not the apparent sexuality but still the power of the music.

And as Barbra Streizant so eloquently put it in a movie I love 'The mirror has two faces', why do we still want, desire and ultimately fall in love when it is beyond any doubt that it is painful, possibly tragic, and most of the time will make our heart break in half?

Because it feel so fu*ng great! :)

Because every time you are in love the world becomes so much more colorful, everyday is like Xmas eve and because even the pain of missing the other person is so bitter-sweet that its like a drug, you keep asking for more. And because, lets face it, our lives are characterized by our loneliness. Human beings are lonely creatures, they try to go through life sharing some things along the way, but we come screaming into this world and leave it, screaming again because we don't want to let go.

I remember distintively the final scene in a movie , 'Meet Joe Black', where Death, played by Brad Pitt, has to say goodbye to life, a life he chose to experience in order to see what is that wonderful thing that all these people who die do not want to let go. So Joe Black (Death) is looking at the fireworks, for the birthday party of the man he has come to take with him (Anthony Hopkins), whose daughter he fell in love with.

"
: It's hard to let go isn't it?
:: Yes it is, Bill.
: Well that's life, what can I tell you. "

We never want to let go, thats the truth. But we are so lonely while we are here that love, the feeling of being in love, is so intoxicating because we feel that even if it is fo a little while, our loneliness is no more, we share our thoughts and feelings with another human being that we feel is so close to our souls, like the half we always expected to find.

Of course love is experienced according to one's spiritual and mental growth. The more evolved the individual the more intense the love experience will be. And of course add to that the bonus of sex and what you have is the good ol'recipe for harmless intoxication by endorfines.

I sound cynic right?

Well I' m not:) Besides chemistry and psychology, besides any scientific or other explanation we try to find, love is one of life's mysteries. We may try to understand it , or reason about it but its impossilbe.

Its grandure lies in the mystery of its nature, and as long as it lasts it does feel wonderfully , uniquely, tremendeously fuck*ng great!

Lucky are the ones who experience it, and when face with it one must not linger or fear. One must go for it cause even the pain is better than the alternative. You have to try. Because if you haven't tried, you haven't lived.


As Ted Arroway to Ellie (I always thought of Ellie as my alter ego) says in Contact :

"You’re an interesting species, an interesting mix.
You’re capable of such beautiful dreams and such horrible nightmares.
You fell so lost, so cut off, so alone, only you’re not.
See, in all our searching, the only thing we found that
makes the emptiness bearable is each other "


Ever since I saw and read Contact it was these words that always summarised
in the most precice way my desire to Know :

Palmer Joss:
By doing this, you're willing to give your life, you're willing to die for it. Why?

Ellie Arroway:
For as long as I can remember, I've been searching for something, some
reason why we're here. What are we doing here? Who are we? If this is a
chance to find out even just a little part of that answer... I don't
know, I think it's worth a human life. Don't you?