The Dictionary defines an “aha moment” as “an instant at which the solution to a problem becomes clear, a sudden understanding, recognition or resolution”.
We’ve all had at least one “aha moment”, right? You’ll be sitting there, minding your own business and out of nowhere EUREKA! You have a moment of clarity so poignant that it changes you forever.
I recently had one of these moments and I want to share it with you…
I was listening to NPR one morning, like I always do, and they were playing an archived interview with astrophysicist and author, Carl Sagan. In Sagan’s book, Pale Blue Dot, he presents our world through a lense many of us are unfamiliar with - that of a spacecraft camera.
Through this lense, our Earth appears as a tiny little spec, a pale blue dot, among millions of other points of light in our solar system.
What is the significance of this, you ask? I was considering the same thing when the interviewer asked the following question, the answer to which inspired my “aha moment”:
FLATOW: “Pale Blue Dot,” that’s always the first question that every interviewer asked an author, why the title?
Mr. CARL SAGAN (Astronomer): Well, I was an experimenter on the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft. And after they swept by the Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune systems, it was possible to do something I had wanted to do from the beginning, and that is to turn the cameras on one of these spacecraft back to photograph the planet from which it had come. And clearly, there would not be much scientific data from this, because we were so far away that the Earth was just a point - a pale blue dot.
But when we took the picture, there was something about it that seemed to me so poignant, vulnerable, tiny. And if we had photographed it from a much further distance, it would have been gone, lost against the backdrop of distant stars. And to me, it - I thought there - that’s us. That’s our world. That’s all of us - everybody you know, everybody you love, everybody you ever heard of lived out their lives there, on a mote of dust in a sunbeam.
And it spoke to me about the need for us to care for one another, and also to preserve the pale blue dot, which is the only home we’ve ever known. And it underscored the tinyness, the comparative insignificance of our world and ourselves.
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Excerpt from Pale Blue Dot:
“As the spacecraft left our planetary neighborhood for the fringes of the solar system, engineers turned it around for one last look at its home planet. Voyager 1 was about 6.4 billion kilometers (4 billion miles) away, and approximately 32 degrees above the ecliptic plane, when it captured this portrait of our world. Caught in the center of scattered light rays (a result of taking the picture so close to the Sun), Earth appears as a tiny point of light, a crescent only 0.12 pixel in size.
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.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.
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.”
— Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994
