That mote of dust in a sunbeam
Hello, my friends!
A little while back I stumbled across a Reddit thread which suggested vacationers learn not to fall too much in love with their vacation destinations—at least not so much in love that they succumb to the urge to uproot their whole lives and move to that place.
Buried in the more than five thousand responses to this advice, I found this comment:
“The only zen you find at the tops of mountains is the zen you bring up there.” … There’s a similar storyline in Bojack Horseman where a character fantasizing about living in a cottage in the woods gets told “if you wanted a peaceful life, you would already have a peaceful life.”
It’s a solid, classic observation: You bring the you you already are wherever you go. But I thought about it a little bit in the context of last week’s BlueOrigin flight. If you’ve watched the news at all, you probably saw something about this: William Shatner was given a seat on that flight, and after playing a space captain for many years, the man finally had a chance to go to space himself.
Here’s a video showing Shatner experiencing weightlessness and looking down upon the Earth from orbit. While people around him laugh and exclaim and do backflips, he seems stricken with awe.
Afterward, he tried to put into words what he’d experienced:
I don’t know, I can’t even begin to express what I…what I would love to do is to communicate as much as possible…the jeopardy…the the the moment you see how… The vulnerability of everything, it’s so…small. This air which is keeping us alive is thinner than your skin! It’s…it’s a…it’s a sliver! It’s immeasurably small when you think in terms of the Universe! It’s negligible! This air…Mars doesn’t have it! No…nothing…I mean, this…
It’s fair to conclude, I think, that Shatner experienced a touch of the “overview effect,” which Wikipedia frames as:
The overview effect is a cognitive shift in awareness reported by some astronauts during spaceflight, often while viewing the Earth from outer space. It is the experience of seeing firsthand the reality of the Earth in space, which is immediately understood to be a tiny, fragile ball of life, “hanging in the void”, shielded and nourished by a paper-thin atmosphere. From space, national boundaries vanish, the conflicts that divide people become less important, and the need to create a planetary society with the united will to protect this “pale blue dot” becomes both obvious and imperative.
It wasn’t that long ago that Jeff Bezos, who owns BlueOrigin, took this same flight himself. You might remember all the jokes about his phallic spaceship, for one. But some expressed hope that Bezos, one of the world’s wealthiest men, might experience the overview effect himself, and return to Earth with a sense of empathy and compassion for others. Imagine, a billionaire rocked to the core by the sight of Earth, so fragile, who then came back to the ground and put his wealth to work solving climate change, or poverty, or income inequality, or any one of the many crises affecting the planet.
That hope was dashed, for me at least, by footage of Bezos in space. While Shatner expressed awe and wonder, Bezos did backflips and tried to throw Skittles into other passengers’ mouths.
Why were their experiences so different? Is it that Shatner is predisposed to that sense of wonder, and Bezos isn’t? I can’t answer that, though I’ve listened to enough of Shatner’s music over the years to know he’s nothing if not introspective. Did Shatner bring that capacity for wonder to space with him, while Bezos brought a compulsion for attention and power? Look again at those videos. Shatner’s body language, his expression, seem to say I can’t believe the gift I’ve been given; if that’s the overview effect, then he’s likely feeling a powerful new sense of community, and a decreased sense of self-importance. I don’t think Bezos felt that at all. What a lost opportunity.
Return with me, if you would, to Carl Sagan’s legendary observation about our pale blue dot. From Wikipedia:
Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of planet Earth taken on February 14, 1990, by the Voyager 1 space probe from a record distance of about 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles, 40.5 AU), as part of that day’s Family Portrait series of images of the Solar System. In the photograph, Earth’s apparent size is less than a pixel; the planet appears as a tiny dot against the vastness of space, among bands of sunlight reflected by the camera.
As Voyager 1 left our solar system, Sagan asked NASA to please turn the camera around, and take a photograph of Earth, of our home. About the resulting photo, he wrote:
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 quote often stops there, but it’s worth reading on:
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.
This passage is perhaps the most poetic thing I’ve ever read, and its message is so simple: Nothing is all about me, or you. The things that are so big to us here and now are so very small, as are we.
What if that understanding was the you that you carried with you anyplace you went? How different would this planet, and all of us, be?
✏️Until next time,
Jg
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