This is a photograph that the Voyager I took in 1990. This photo was a result of a suggestion made by Carl Sagan and explained in his book Pale Blue Dot (1994).
Our world in perspective
This picture shows the Earth from 6.4 billion kilometres away. From this perspective, everything we know, everyone that has lived, all our ideas and dreams are located in a pale blue dot in the middle of nothingness. Carl Sagan said it best:
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 (1994)
This is an inspiring reflection of reality. Carl Sagan motivated millions of people (including myself) to pursue studies in science and engineering. Today, as a master student in management and engineering of environment and energy, I face myself with the same reflection of reality. This is my reality, of a man that is in the middle of the nothingness that conceals inside his head all the thoughts he ever had and will ever have and that forgets memories that have constructed my 27 years of being alive.
In search of oneself
Even today, after several accomplishments in my life, I find myself once again sitting down on a corner of the world. I spend my time studying and trying to improve myself, yet my results are nowhere to be found. I have had no impact on our human commitment to reaching our Sustainable Development Goals. I have had no chances to collaborate with the agencies and think tanks that design how the world could look like. I have had no field experience helping societies to improve their energy access, their sanitation needs or their education. I have been selfish, focusing on my own improvement, as if that would make me a better person. It does not.
Crude realities like these are what remind me of the Pale Blue Dot. It is always a progressive idea that has been fixated on my mind so intensely that I can no longer separate my vision from the understanding that we are all together in this.
I changed my career because I wanted to do better in this world. As of today, my role is unclear, my time is yet to come or it has faded away by past accomplishments. I do not know this yet. The reality is that while I want to make better for the most amount of people as possible, I do not know how I can do it.
Selfishness vs selflessness
Nonetheless, my life is the product of my parents’ decisions, of our past generations. I understand that our children’s lives depend on us to the same measure. I feel anxiousness when thinking about the future and I paralyze against the adversity of creating something useful. My brain is wired to be essentially lost between selfishness and selflessness. But this is the main thought that brings me back to my daily actions: all that I will do in my life has to be dedicated for the betterment of our future generations, while understanding and respecting our past. We need to solve the energy problem, the sanitation and poverty problems, the water problem, the political problem, the inequality problem. There are many problems to solve in order to sustain our humanity through time. I want to be selfish, but not for myself anymore, for my humanity, I want to be selfish for us, to do our very best. The only worthwhile sacrifice in life is to help future generations succeed in the test of individual selfishness. Can we overcome this? I do not know. Perhaps not, but wouldn’t it be terrible not to even put a plan in place? I hope we can overcome our selfishness – but I have not done that myself so who am I to even play around with this proposal?
The United Nations are showing us a visible set of 17 objectives to follow. The WHO is teaching us about our own health and how to improve it. The IEA denotes the ways of the future in terms of Energy. And billions of workers and entrepreneurs wake up each and every day to support our common goals, even if they do not think about it.
I leave this exercise of thought for later since I fear I might collapse this message into nothingness, as it normally happens when we are unprepared.
In space, there is a pale blue dot. That is us.
There is no other place like home. We have to take care of it.
Everything written here is a personal reflection and is by no means educational, financial or professional advice in any way.
Please feel free to cite and refer reliable sources in the comment section down below.