Carl Sagan's Perspective:

The WTC disaster reminds us once again that truly, we are in our tiny boat all together, sailing a dangerous void on an uncertain voyage, towards some destination far far away "in the deeps of time, amongst the innumerable stars" *.    A while before his untimely death, Carl Sagan helped arrange for the Voyager spacecraft,  then out beyond Pluto on the cold dark fringes of the Solar System,   to take a picture looking back from whence it came. It is a famous picture, and I am sure many will remember it. In it you see our little family of planets, warming themselves about the Sun. Sagan's commentary on the image was sent out again this week by Craig Tupper, one of my fellow space freaks at NASA. Here it is:

"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."

It seems to me that if our explorations into the cosmos can only assist the human family to comprehend these stupendous realities even a little more clearly, to grasp them a little more firmly, then the money and effort invested on astronomy and space exploration have been worthwhile indeed.

Next month we will return to report on MAP (the Microwave Anisotropy Probe) and see whatever happened to DS-1.

* Tolkien.

Bill Wheaton