These magical moments don’t happen very often these days.
My brother and I are ardent fans of Carl Sagan and his
edifying video series called the COSMOS. I think I can safely say that my
brother is more than just a fan of COSMOS, as he has it on his TV, computer,
mobile phone - you name it!
It is undeniably a fantastic feeling to hear Carl narrate
about the mystery of nature, its enormity, beauty and the infinite joy one
receives while pursuing it and yet feel the yearning to want to know more.
Our joy knew no bounds when we heard a sequel of COSMOS
narrated by the ingenious Neil Degrasse Tyson is expected to release sometime
in 2014. As if the news wasn’t enticing enough, watching this trailer only made
the wait painstakingly longer.
During a casual phone conversation my brother and I had last evening, he said the most amazing thing to me. It is true that
growing up, we get carried away with our routines too much to pause, take stock
and appreciate small pleasures such as this. But I could not have missed this
even on a sleepy conversation.
What he told me made me feel great about myself and made my whole
life worthwhile.
Before I quote our conversation, I would like to quote
Sagan’s very own pale blue dot – only to emphasize the gravitas and profundity
of what ensues.
From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of
any 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 posturing, 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.
Me: I can’t wait for COSMOS II to release.Brother: Yes, it is slated to release sometime 2014.Me: But it feels like too long a wait. What if something happens to me by that time, what if I die?Brother: Hmm! Then, you will conform to the cosmos, as your atoms would still be around. And what’s more, the video series will have Tyson talking about YOU!
*Yes, I repeat! This made me feel great about myself and
made my whole life worthwhile.*
