CMDR PAUSANIAS - THE SHIP OF THE MIND EXPEDITION - DAY 58
06 Oct 2020Pausanias
Hi Cmdrs,Last night I shared with you why my Carrier is called 'The Carl Sagan'. Tonight I'd like to share another piece of memorabilia I own, the Pale Blue Dot image hangs on the wall in my quarters on the Carrier. It's there to remind me where home is and how insignificant humans are in the vastness of this Galaxy.
The Ancient Probe called Voyager 1 was just leaving our planetary neighbourhood and Carl made the request that the Voyager camera was pointed back to Earth to take a photo. The idea was initially rejected through fear that the lock on the spacecraft may be broken but Carl's request prevailed and on 14th February 1990 the camera was pointed back towards Earth and the famous image was taken. The entire Earth took up less than one pixel in the photo, a pale blue dot.
This image was transmitted the 6.4 billion kilometers back to Earth where it appears to be in a stream of sunlight, this was in fact a camera aberration caused by the sensitive camera being pointed towards the sun itself. Voyager survived the photo and continued its journey sending back its data for years.
The picture on my wall also carries the following text which Carl added to the image . . .
Look again at 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.
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.
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.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. 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 with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
-- Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994
When Carl wrote that we humans were a fragile species on the brink of annihilating ourselves, possibly, fortunately we did get past that stage and we did terraform other Worlds before we completely ravaged the Earth thereby saving it. Now humans are a strong force throughout this Galaxy at least. Maybe one day we will extend our reach to other Galaxies, for now this one seems plenty big enough.
I have visited Voyager 1 in my Sidewinder, of all ships to use! Here you can see me as close as I can get, Voyager now has an impenetrable shield around it to protect it for future millennia to come.
My crew are now halfway through their few days off. I haven't heard from them, I hope they are OK and out of trouble.
Total Carrier jump distance since 10th August: 17,000 ltyrs - (Personal note: 34 jumps on 2 Oct)
Total Ship jump so far: 36,775
Total planets Level 3 scanned: 13,552
Total exploration data: 343,500,000 credits
Total systems with my name on: 2663
The Cutter is now 13,012 ltyrs away from Sol - slightly further away tonight!
TRA X-1, approximately 3,750 to go . . .
P