As is so often the case, the late great Douglas Adams had a relevant quote:
"And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex — just to show her.
And into one end he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and into the other end he plugged his wife: so that when he turned it on she saw in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it.
To Trin Tragula’s horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain; but to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion."
I feel like one should already have this understanding of cosmic insignificance from multiple kinds of knowledge that I remember encountering in grade school.
Just looking up and knowing those are not just stars but full galaxies. Learning a little about geological time spans versus paleontology versus written human history. From those, it should be obvious already just how ephemeral our lives are in time and space.
I got another (fractal?) feeling of insignificance when I realized "ancient" poets, philosophers, and historians were describing basically the same emotional and metaphysical concerns that we grapple with today. We cram some extra modern knowledge into our heads, but the fundamental cognitive life isn't really changing much.
Reminds me the Earth rise photo from Apollo 8, that every human being, except the three in the CM, was in that photo. Add to that that every human being anyone ever heard of, and all their ancestors, down to the first cell, lived on that globe.
The Pale Blue Dot is an incredible image but actually understates our cosmic insignificance. Voyager 1 hadn’t left the Solar System at the time and is still light years from our nearest stellar neighbors. Even our farthest stellar neighbors—the individual stars that form constellations in our night sky—are situated in just one section of the Orion arm of the Milky Way. And the Milky Way is, of course, just one galaxy among hundreds of billions.
There are a number of videos that try to show the scale on YouTube, but I'm a big fan of the one by Cody's Lab where he has a drive to proxima centauri, IIRC.
The Egyptian-Greek-Roman notions of the cosmos and their related Judeo-Christian-Islamic religious traditions seem to have a much harder time accepting the scientific revelations of the depths of time and space than Buddhist and Hindu philosophies, which have vast notions of time (though perhaps not space) baked in, eg:
> "Imagine a great mountain of solid iron, one hundred leagues high and wide. If once every hundred years a man were to brush it lightly with a cloth, the mountain would be worn away before a kalpa ends. And yet many kalpas have already passed." (Buddhist Sutra description of a kalpa)
As secularism became more prevalent in Europe and America, some new voices appeared - eg, HP Lovecraft, one of the first writers to really dive into the consequences of the discovery of the immensity of time and space. It's likely difficult for people who've been taught their entire lives that they're the entire point of existence and the most significant element in a cosmic story, to have material scientific reality make such a mockery of that notion, and indeed many have thus fled from that 'deadly light' into what Lovecraft called 'the peace and safety of a new dark age.'
This is definitely not true from a philosophical level. Contemplation of an infinite god/cosmos, and the seemingly infinite nature of time are core aspects of early Greek philosophy, which heavily influenced the philosophy of each of the Abrahamic religions.
As you started alluding to, the reason the west may seem more fearful of the infinite is likely because of widespread secularism, not western religion. An infinite cosmos is not nearly as scary to someone whose life purpose is appeasing an all good/infinite/timeless/immutable being, as it is for someone whose life purpose is managing their dopamine levels.
Somewhat related: being someone who grew up in the west, I've always wondered how Hindus and Buddhists deal with evidence of the big bang. It fits fairly naturally into Abrahamic traditions that believe in a beginning to the universe. Though, it is fairly important to the philosophy of those eastern traditions that time and space (samsara) has no beginning or end.
Obviously, everyone generates feelings in different ways. However, Pale Blue Dot I would hope generates feeling that we're all on this rock together. We're all human and we should all be on the same side of working together for our species.
Astronauts that have seen earth from afar get a profound feeling of love for Earth and humanity, and that we're all in this together (should be all in this together).
There is a beautiful scene about this that articulates it well. It is a NASA documentary about a female astronaut that sees Earth from space for the first time. I wish I could find which movie it is.
I've recently been reading the Pensees, so it feels timely that this article was posted. I'll add here a couple more practical pieces of advice that Pascal offers for dealing with what he considers the wretchedness of human experience:
"One must know oneself [reference to Socrates]. If this does not serve to discover truth, it at least serves to regulate one's life, and there is nothing better"
"Physical science will not console me for the ignorance of morality in the time of affliction. But the science of ethics will always console me for the ignorance of the physical sciences."
"Because of the way that sunlight is scattered off the
spacecraft, the Earth seems to be sitting in a beam of light, as if there were some special importance to our small planet. But this is just an accident of geometry and optics. The Sun emits its radiation equitably to all directions in space."
Also, from the posted article itself:
"Indeed, even the hint of perceptual salience – the sunbeam in which Earth is suspended – isn’t a genuine feature of Earth’s position in the cosmos but an artefact of the image itself."
Imagine giving a animal a mirror that then turns into a map that allows them to zoom out to pale blue dot levels. The ability to be shook by that , would be interesting who has that.
Other people will occasionally verbalize the same kind of thoughts that I've had yet never spoken aloud. That's enough to make me accept that we're at least thinking in the same way.
"When you are put into the Vortex you are given just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it a tiny little marker, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says 'You are here'."
As much as I always appreciated the essay, the image seemed to engender the exact opposite feeling in myself; an overwhelming sense that this really is all that matters. There is no meaning for humans to be found "out there". Only this, only us. We will all be born, live, and die on this rock. And all we have in this entire universe is the other primates inhabiting it with us, and the collective meaning that we can create for ourselves together to distract from that fact. Anything else is delusional fantasy.
And that's what I could extract from Carl Sagan's reflections of that image. This lone spec of dust is all there is for us. Make of it all you can, because this is all there will ever be.
I wonder how anyone else could interpret it otherwise.
I’ve never understood the “cosmic insignificance” feeling either, Pale Blue Dot is a picture of all the joy and wonder in the (accessible) universe and I get live on it? I feel gratitude at these images.
I learnt it the hard way that not everyone appreciates the beauty of our cosmic insignificance. Most people are fully immersed in this tiny world we built and I sometimes envy them.
The central fallacy is that size has to do with significance. It is a huge non sequitur and grist for the deepity mill to conclude that just because Earth is tiny in comparison to the Universe in terms of size that it must therefore be insignificant.
Is life, specifically intelligent life, signiant on a cosmic scale?
If so there’s a strong chance that Earth is the most significant place in the galaxy at least. It’s possible we’ll screw ourselves up before we make it to other star systems, but of we do manage self sustaining interstellar ships then within a cosmically tiny amount of time humans, or the evolved dwacwndents, will occupy every star in this galaxy.
Maybe that’s common, maybe that’s insignificant on a universal scale, maybe reaching the level of development humans have is quite common, but it’s quite possible that Earth is, or will be, very significant on a galactic scale if nothing else.
Maybe. Maybe not. We really just don’t know. If sentient life is vanishingly rare on a cosmic scale then there would some significance to Earth (currently). But it is otherwise pretty insignificant.
Even if we’re significant on a galactic scale, that’s a long way from cosmic significance. Even our galaxy is pretty insignificant on that scale.
People here flippantly conclude whether something is significant or insignificant without defining what significance is and how to determine it. Question begging and bad assumptions abound.
"Pale blue dot" talk is ultimately an intellectually vacuous appeal to confusion and emotion. It strives to seem profound, but it only manages to approximate a silly deepity.
I think it does. It’s not proof that this place is insignificant, but the fact that it’s just a tiny dot in an unimaginably vast universe is strongly suggestive.
Compare with a hypothetical universe consisting of a million-kilometer-diameter crystal sphere with the Earth at its center. Again not proof, but absent any further information, one would reasonably conclude that Earth is much more significant in that universe.
Dunno. The crystal sphere wouldn’t tell me anything. If I’m the kind of life form that requires such sphere in order to evolve in the first place, then of course I’d observe such a sphere around my planet— otherwise I wouldn’t be there to observe anything!
If I lived on such a planet, I might say, well, I’d need a big sun-like outer gas giant in order to prove we’re significant. As it is, we’re just a little crystal sphere in a huge universe.
What he was saying is if the total universe was merely a few million kilometers, the earth would form a much larger and non-trivial portion of it compared to the vast size of the observable universe in real life.
There is no cosmic perspective. There's only my perspective, your perspective, and so on. Perhaps there are alien perspectives, and from their perspective, their world is very significant.
When you talk about significance, you have to bring in considerations of value and worth. And at that point, you have to bring in the individual. Significance is only significant to someone.
That's not the point at issue. And it is also entirely possible to have independent grounds on which to judge significance other than "this is my neighborhood" (which, btw, may very well be a very legitimate basis for judging significance).
A good place to begin is to define significance and to identify and explain what causes something to be significant.
My problem with these immersed people of this world is that it’s like being residents of a terrarium, entirely at the mercy of the Lord to keep the A/C on. We need few people to wonder what is out there - who is maintaining the terrarium temperature?
It might be that a lot of people just aren't well enough primed to appreciate the pale blue dot as it isn't recognizable enough.
This is why, despite current controversy and how fun it is to mock Katy Perry, space tourism is so important, particularly when it gets to the point of Low Earth Orbit.
Being able to see the whole entire planet in detail right out the window apparently has quite the psychological effect.
Maybe we really are so insignificant that ultimately it doesn't matter. So, we might as well make the most of the time we have here!
Speaking for myself... Some of us care about this little spec of dust, so we try to challenge those who want to destroy the planet. We like making cool stuff, building little empires, and also making our communities fun and thriving!
We didn't build this world though. If anything it built us. And everywhere we look there's depth to it, whether we contemplate the stars, the worlds inside ourselves, or mundane earth events like a glance over clinked glasses when you fell in love...
Here's some Borges:
"Tennyson said that if we could understand a single flower we would know who we are and what the world is. Perhaps he meant that there is no deed, however so humble, which does not implicate universal history and the infinite concatenation of causes and effects. Perhaps he meant that the visible world is implicit, in its entirety, in each manifestation, just as, in the same way, will, according to Schopenhauer, is implicit, in its entirety, in each individual.
Dissociation and viewing your existence as nothing is not beautiful and it's definitely not honorable. Our existence is the realest we're going to get. Your life is 100% of your universe dawg, act like it.
Space is barely even real to us earth critters lol
Ok, why are you acting like you're contradicting OP when the two viewpoints necessarily go together?
If the rest of the universe cares about us, we need to live our lives for the rest of the universe. If we're cosmically insignificant, then what's here and now is what matters, and what we have to live for.
To you. I find a great amount of beauty in appreciating how small and unlikely our existence is - in how important it is to us, and how unimportant it is to the rest of the entire universe.
Earth is the only planet known to have the proven conditions for Life in that it has Life. On top that that, it is the home of the only known advanced intelligence that observes the Universe. There's nothing in the Universe with more significance.
Sure, you should just write like that, with the dunktropes edited out. That's basically what the moderation comment is asking you to do, not to debate your views on the article or xenobiology.
For real, I wouldn't consider myself an anthropcentrist, but Earth might be the only planet with agency, with a noosphere [1]. This gotta place it in the, like, top 10 of all planets in the Universe, at least.
"And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex — just to show her.
And into one end he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and into the other end he plugged his wife: so that when he turned it on she saw in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it.
To Trin Tragula’s horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain; but to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion."