Pale Blue Dot
“Fascinating... memorable... revealing... perhaps the best of Carl Sagan’s books.”—The Washington Post Book World (front page review) In Cosmos, the late astronomer Carl Sagan cast his gaze over the magnificent mystery of the Universe and made it accessible to millions of people around the world. Now in this stunning sequel, Carl Sagan completes his revolutionary journey through space and time. Future generations will look back on our epoch as the time when the human race finally broke into a radically new frontier—space. In Pale Blue Dot, Sagan traces the spellbinding history of our launch into the cosmos and assesses the future that looms before us as we move out into our own solar system and on to distant galaxies beyond. The exploration and eventual settlement of other worlds is neither a fantasy nor luxury, insists Sagan, but rather a necessary condition for the survival of the human race.
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- Have you seen that website that shows the solar system if the moon were only one pixel? [1]
Getting from the Sun to Pluto takes a very long time you might give up and close your browser tab.
Many theories attempt to explain why we haven’t yet encountered extraterrestrial civilizations. One possibility is that, given the immense scale of the cosmos, intelligent life may exist but is simply too far away for contact. Another idea is that while life may arise on other planets, it rarely, if ever, evolves beyond primitive intelligence. Intelligence here defined as ability to understand the cosmos and even leave their own world.
But there is another, more sobering theory. It suggests that when life does evolve to the point of intelligence, it eventually develops technology so powerful that it inadvertently brings about its own destruction. Whether through war, environmental collapse, or uncontrollable advancements, these civilizations may end themselves before they have a chance to explore the universe, or be found by others. This concept just described is called The Great Filter. The Great Filter proposes that there is some critical barrier or stage in the evolution of intelligent life that is extremely hard to surpass. [a]
There's a Wikipedia page dedicated to nuclear close calls between the United States and the former Soviet Union, and also present Russia. [2]
Perhaps the most famous close call is the one involving Vasily Arkhipov during the Cuban Missile Crisis [3] [2]
“Man has dominated man to his injury.” — Ecclesiastes 8:9
The Great Filter need not be caused by the intelligent beings themselves and can be natural like the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs. It's said that asteroids of varying sizes crash into Earth every X million years.
There's a counter argument to the Fermi paradox that perhaps we are too primitive for advanced alien beings to bother with us. One of my internet friends put it like this -
"there are counter arguments to the fermi paradox; one of which hires the analogy of, iirc, a guy looking over at a group of insects/anthill/ worms. he doesn't go wondering whether those worms are sentient enough to meditate on his thoughts. he doesn't think to sit back to converse with them. hell, they wouldn't understand him even if he tried. the paradox only holds water on the assumption that such civilisation is within the scope of our comprehension. " [4]
But there's a counter to that counter argument.
Yes it's possible that we're too primitive for advanced civilizations to bother about. But even in the case of ants and humans, isn't it true that we sometimes try to interfere with their lives just to see how they'd react either for fun or just sheer curiousity?
Yes, it's true that we might not be able to comprehend alien species. After all, they evolved in worlds different from ours. But, any sufficiently advanced civilization would understand Mathematics. Mathematics is a universal language and for them to be scientifically advanced means they understand science. They could, if they desired, find a way to communicate with earthlings using the universal language - Science. Carl Sagan made this point in one of his books and I think it was Pale Blue Dot (highly recommended).
I've shared some of my thoughts about aliens on my blog posts which my comment here were from. [4] [5]
[1] https://www.joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsys...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_close_calls
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily_Arkhipov
[4] https://www.rxjourney.net/extraterrestrial-intelligence-and-...
- I'm currently reading (Re-reading actually) Cosmos by Carl Sagan, and in a chapter where he talked about Venus and how hot Venus is (Venus is actually the hottest planet in the solar system despite Mercury being closer to the Sun - although this wasn't mentioned in the book), and how the space probes that were sent there met an ugly fate, he had this interesting footnote which I want to share -
"In this stifling landscape, there is not likely to be anything alive, even creatures very different from us. Organic and other conceivable biological molecules would simply fall to pieces. But, as an indulgence, let us imagine that intelligent life once evolved on such a planet. Would it then invent science? The development of science on Earth was spurred fundamentally by observations of the regularities of the stars and planets. But Venus is completely cloud-covered. The night is pleasingly long - about 59 Earth days long but nothing of the astronomical universe would be visible if you looked up into the night sky of Venus. Even the Sun would be invisible in the daytime; its light would be scattered and diffused over the whole sky - just as scuba divers see only a uniform enveloping radiance beneath the sea. If a radio telescope were built on Venus, it could detect the Sun, the Earth and other distant objects. If astrophysics developed, the existence of stars could eventually be deduced from the principles of physics, but they would be theoretical constructs only. I sometimes wonder what their reaction would be if intelligent beings on Venus one day learned to fly, to sail in the dense air, to penetrate the mysterious cloud veil 45 kilometers above them and eventually to emerge out the top of the clouds, to look up and for the first time witness that glorious universe of Sun and planets and stars."
. . .
Carl Sagan is an amazing author, and I've shared the famous excerpt from his book Pale Blue Dot multiple times before - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47565381
A few mentions of his books in my blog post here - https://www.rxjourney.net/30-things-i-know
- Carl Sagan just might be my favorite non-fiction author. As Richard Dawkins said, he was incapable of constructing a bad sentence.
One of my favorite parts of this book was the essay "The Dragon in my Garage". The essay argues that if you can't provide any testable or falsifiable evidence for a dragon's existence, then its existence is no different than the absence of a dragon.
Mentioned it in my blog -
"The promise of an afterlife is a cornerstone of many religions, offering comfort in the face of mortality. However, this promise often hinges on the existence of an all-powerful deity, whose nature and existence remain subjects of debate. Central to many afterlife beliefs is the notion of an invisible, immortal soul or spirit capable of experiencing emotions, enabling the concepts of reward or punishment. Yet, no empirical evidence has been found to confirm the existence of such a soul. Acclaimed science author Carl Sagan illustrated this challenge with his “dragon in the garage” analogy. If someone claims to have a dragon that is invisible, silent, intangible, and undetectable by any means, there is no practical difference between the dragon’s existence and non-existence. Similarly, without verifiable evidence, the existence of an immortal soul remains unproven."
My other favorite books from him are -
1. Pale Blue Dot - That "look again at that dot" might be the most poetic thing I've read.
For the unaware, or for those who want to read it again, here's the full quote -
"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 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. 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.
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."
2. Cosmos.
3. BILLIONS AND BILLIONS - the part he described coming to know that he had cancer was beautifully written.
4. Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors: A Search for Who We Are with Ann Druyan.
I never read that fiction book he wrote - Contact.
But, man, I'm going to add one of his books to my To Be Read list again lol.
- Hard to choose for myself who made the post.
But some of my favorites are -
1. God: The Failed Hypothesis Book by Victor J. Stenger
2. The God Delusion Book by Richard Dawkins
3. Berlin: The Downfall 1945 Book by Antony Beevor
4. A Song of Ice and Fire Novel series by George R.R. Martin
5. A Short History of Nearly Everything Book by Bill Bryson
6. Billions and Billions Book by Carl Sagan
7. Flowers for Algernon Short story by Daniel Keyes
8. I'm Glad My Mom Died Book by Jennette McCurdy
9. Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden--from 9/11 to Abbottabad Book by Peter Bergen
10. Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space Book by Carl Sagan
11. The Metamorphosis Novella by Franz Kafka
12. The Selfish Gene Book by Richard Dawkins
Gun to my head, pick one? The God Delusion.
- I've mentioned it everywhere I post recently, but I just read Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan as a bedtime book with my kids and it's phenomenal. One of the central themes is his belief that we should someday become world movers, given the eventual asteroid that will likely do significant damage to Earth. But, the argument is much more nuanced and wouldn't be able to do it justice here.
It's a great read — even if it's a little dated. If anything, you get to see how much we achieved that in the early 90s was still hypothetical, and what things we haven't quite pulled off yet.
- I'm reading Pale Blue Dot to my kids at night currently so this is really awesome. (The Voyager missions are described in excellent detail in ways that I never appreciated fully before.)
It blows my mind that these are machines from the 8-track era. And they have fallbacks and redundancies that were completely ahead of their time.
