All of the Debates, All of the Wars, All of the Yelling

They all take place here:

That little speck looks like an artifact of the photo, but it is not. That is Earth, our home planet, as seen from 3.7 billion miles away by Voyager I in 1990. As Carl Sagan said over ten years ago:

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.

And yet, no matter how many times this is pointed out, we cannot get along. This planet is loaded with self-important small-minded men who seek to impose their views, their moralities, their ideologies on others. They persist even though it is pitifully obvious by now that this planet is less than a speck, a mote, in a vast sea of darkness.

Many of them feel that they are called by God to do so, to be the moral, if not actual authority over everyone else on that little speck. Because their version of God told them to, they will try to bring about death and desolation to everyone else who does not follow their path. From the distance that Voyager I took that photo, nobody would have a clue who prevailed on that little mote in the sky.

Voyager I is now three times as far away as when it took that last photo of our world. Its cameras, even if they still worked, could not resolve our world.

If only we put a fraction of the effort into trying to understand and live with each other on this habitable mote of cosmic dust that we spend into being ready to kill each other.

But as that will probably never happen, I sometimes wonder why it was even worth the 30 minutes to do this one blog post. We, as a species, seem to be hard-wired to want to kill each other, because we really are nothing more than a bunch of literate baboons with powerful weaponry.

Sometimes I think that we really are screwed.

Update: Lockwood's post from January on the same subject. Or just go see the photo.