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Feeling small feels good.
Modern life can magnify our problems, that’s deceptive and unhealthy. Truth told: we are so, so small. And so are our problems.
I’m a big fan of the late astronomer Carl Sagan. He was wise in ways most of us can only wish.
If you don’t know the photo and story around the Pale Blue Dot, here’s a short true that you might just find comforting amid all the fuss and flutter of a digital modern life.
Carl Sagan was a serious scientist who led efforts to explore and understand our cosmos, he was also teacher and popularizer of science. Sagan played a key role in designing many foundational space exploration projects.
One of these was Voyager 1. Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 is still going, it left our solar system back in 2012 and we are still receiving data from it. Not much of course, it is old and far away. But it’s still going.
The wisdom of Carl Sagan was remarkable. He knew that what humans needed more than anything was to understand that we are truly, all on the same side. And he tried for all his life to help us grasp that message.
He did that because he knew we needed it. That our lives would continue to grow more frenetic and stressed. Humanity needed something to help us stay calm.
Wisdom and the value of perspective.
Carl Sagan and Voyager were in their prime in the late 70’s and early 80’s. A time when two opposing giants cast shadows over the Earth. Each determined that the other believe they would destroy the planet before taking the losing side in a war.
Sagan was a passionate humanist and an optimist. He believed that if people could get it through their heads that we are common inhabitants of a lonely planet that we would find our better nature and set aside our warring ways.
Sagan was taken with those beautiful Earthrise images taken from the surface of the moon by the Apollo missions. But he felt like something was still to be gained in people seeing Earth from further away. Seeing it as the lonely planet in a vast universe that it is.
