Image credit: Cornell University and the Carl Sagan Institute
The late, great Carl Sagan would have been 90 on November 9th
If anyone could ever accuse Carl Sagan of anything, it would be that he was a seeker of truth and peace. Indeed, his Pale Blue Dot was an exhortation to us all, so tiny on this pale blue dot, a Pale Blue Dot lost in a sunbeam, to live on and work towards a lasting peace among all the peoples of the earth.
Truth is the essence of science. We search for it in the data we collect and in the theories we propose. We always follow the data where ever it leads but, in no way, do we ever compromise that principle, that it is the truth we seek. Carl was a truth teller who never minced words. He was honest to a fault, and the world now sorely misses people with such character.
Carl Sagan’s birthday this year coincided with the results of the US Presidential election, results we’re still sorting out. One thing is clear though, Donald Trump will be the next President of the United States. Many of my students were distraught and deeply upset with this outcome. My words to them were
“Let it give you pause and hope that presidents come and go, but the Republic and the Constitution remain”.
I then reminded them of the words of the great Mahatma Gandhi
Be the change you want to see in the world
I say those words to you now, dear reader. No matter who you voted for, no matter your political stripe, we now have an outcome and have to move on and move forward.
I would add the following and this comes from my educator’s heart, a good place.
Since this time last year many have died reporting the truth, not just in Gaza and the Middle East but all over the world. There have been many lies told to hide the truth. The last thing evil men want is for the truth to be told. What would Carl Sagan say about Gaza and greater Palestine? What would this man of peace have to say about the depraved indifference to human life now live-streamed for the world to see — and the craven monsters dancing to it, wantonly putting it all on display?
At last count, not counting the nameless victims who have been lost to the sands of time, buried under the rubble, claimed by the earth, children and babies, perhaps buried with their parents, buried beneath the rubble, 44,000. The actual number may be close to 10x that — we will never know. Human beings with hopes and dreams, young children, in school or outside playing ball, riding their bicycles, killed instantly, many dismembered beyond recognition – gone in an instant, existing now only in the memories of those who loved them, who bore them, if even they are now still alive.
The world stood by and watched this happen and did nothing. In fact, the so-called “Western Democracies” are actively complicit in the death of these nameless, faceless angels now buried under the rubble. Many of these children aspired to become doctors, mathematicians, scientists, journalists and teachers, noble aspirations, now gone forever. This was the crime of a thousand years, and I don’t think that reality has sunk in to our collective conscience yet, and it may never.
This is the answer to the question so often asked now by Democrats, as it was back in 2016, how did we get here? The Democratic Party, as represented in the Biden-Harris administration, is largely complicit in these crimes against humanity, committed by Benjamin Netanyahu and his criminal government. One phone call from the White House and it would stop. Or one stroke of the pen, the weapons shipments would end — if Joe Biden wanted it to end, it would be over in less time than it takes for him to hang up the phone. The American electorate is horrified by the carnage and the indifference, not just in the White House but in the halls of congress. How many Senators and members of the US House of Representatives have accepted hefty donations from AIPAC? They could return the checks, but they don’t and, in depositing them, they sell their souls.
And this is why we now have Donald Trump — again! Same situation only 8 years later.
The Democratic Party has been corrupted and has lost its way. It has abandoned its core values, values based on service, authentic democracy, and the collective good of all the people. Those values are gone from the party, replaced instead by aspirations towards decadence, avarice, lust, greed, corruption and self-interest.
We did this to ourselves. We have allowed this evil to metastasize in the world, the evil that continues to murder the flower of innocence and the best of humanity in Gaza and greater Palestine. We will now have to cope with the outcome. Unless we stop it, it will destroy us.
Will Donald Trump stop it? Probably not, but let’s give him the chance, since we now have no choice.
Stopping this genocide is the single moral imperative facing the world today. There is no other. What we do now to stop it, what we have failed to do already, will be recorded in history and will be our legacy.
What would Carl’s words to the next president be, regardless of who that is? I would imagine much of it would come from a place of humility; Carl was a humble man. I’m sure it would include references to his Pale Blue Dot.
Lost in the brilliance of a sunbeam, our tiny world is barely visible in this epic image sent back by Voyager 1 as it left the solar system in 1990. On Valentine’s Day of that year, cruising away 6.4 billion kilometers from the Sun, the spacecraft looked back one last time to capture the first ever Solar System family portrait. Image Credit: Voyager Project, NASA, JPL-Caltech
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.
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.
