There We Are, All of Us

In this shot from the Cassini space probe, that arrow points to Earth.

You probably are familiar with Carl Sagan's "Pale Blue Dot" speech, or you've seen one of the videos. Sagan was right in one of his predictions: It took decades to take another photo of the Earth from that distance. (It's actually not easy to do, the Sun has to be shielded from the camera's lens to avoid burning out the sensor.)

A long time ago, I took a night flight to LaGuardia Airport. The little airliner flew south, along the Hudson River, then turned over lower Manhattan and flew to the airport. It was as though they made a pylon turn on the Empire State Building. Manhattan glimmered like a million jewels, most of them the monochromatic glow of fluorescent lights, but there were other colors. It was very pretty.

I've flown at night over other towns. I could see the whitish glow of house lights, the orangey glow of highway lights. Traffic signals winked on and off. If there was heavy traffic on a highway, depending on which way I was looking, it was a river of either white or red lights. At lower altitudes, the different color of illuminated building signs are distinguishable.

What's not distinguishable, normally, is how people are treating one another. One can't tell if in one house, the adults are having a rip-roaring fight or in another house, if the kids are doing their homework. There, a single resident is watching TV and scratching their cat. There a single resident is drinking heavily and kicking their dog. All that is imagined, of course, for a pilot or passenger flying by overhead only sees the lights. Down lower, you might see the flashing lights of emergency vehicles. Up higher, not so much.

From Earth orbit, one can see the overall glow of cities. One can see major weather, smoke from forest fires or ash clouds from volcanoes.

Move out as far as the lunar surface, and one can see continents, oceans and clouds. From the surface of the Moon, one can't see, with the unaided eye, any sign of life on Earth.

Move out to the orbit of Saturn and all you see is a blue dot.

Move out to the vicinity of our closest stellar neighbors and all you'll see is a single point of light, indistinguishable and unremarkable when compared to any of the other points of light in the sky.

The Apollo astronauts took the first photos of the Earth as a blue marble.

There was talk at the time that it would change society worldwide, that people would see that we really are the residents of just one place in the sky, that we are all in it together, that maybe we would just start to figure out how to get along with one another. Certainly Carl Sagan had that reaction hit home when he saw the first pale blue dot image.

But it hasn't happened for the rest of us.

In this country, we are far more polarized than before. We are reaching the point where each side refuses to recognize that the other folks might have a valid point of view, or that they are even human. That sort of "hooray for me and fuck you" view is a bit more understandable among nations, but it's still a little distressing to see that the Chinese are provoking an arms race in South Asia over a bunch of uninhabitable rocks sticking out of the ocean. There are places that people have been killing over for as long as there has been recorded history.

We all can look at the blue marble and the pale blue dot photos and remark on how we're in this all together. But that seems to change nothing with regard to the daily attitudes of the hamburger-eating armed monkeys who are busily shitting all over the only home they have.