Neil deGrasse Tyson will be speaking on campus Wednesday. Although many know Tyson as an astronomer and science popularizer, some of us know him as something more than that.
Some of us recognize Tyson as the successor to Carl Sagan.
Who is Carl Sagan? Sagan was an astronomer. His words have changed lives, including my own.
He made a series, “Cosmos: A Personal Voyage,” in which the viewer is taken on a journey through the universe. For me, the series was quite a learning experience.
Sagan says the cosmos is within our own bodies. “We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.”
Tyson regularly expresses his excitement and passion for such ideas. He’s even making a sequel series to the original “Cosmos” with Ann Druyan, Sagan’s widow, who helped write the original series.
I look forward to watching Tyson’s new “Cosmos” when it airs on Fox in 2014, and I hope anyone reading this will be curious enough to watch the original “Cosmos.”
In honor of Tyson’s visit, I wish to spend the remainder of this column on an excerpt from Sagan’s book “Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space.” Sagan wrote these words when reflecting on an image of Earth taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft from Saturn. These words inspire me, and I hope you will be inspired, too.
“From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider again 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.”
Brandon Lee Gagne is an anthropology senior at UF. His column runs on Fridays. You can contact him via opinions@alligator.org.
