Carl Sagan's "Pale Blue Dot" - Chapter 2: Humility

[Art Blade]

I came across this captivating and entertaining vid and hope some of you enjoy it as well. You might find the video description interesting.

[Dweller_Benthos]

Sagan was always interesting to listen to. He touched on much of this in the Cosmos series, which this might be taken from, or some of this was used for Cosmos, either way, still something to think about.

[BinnZ]

I think that our feel of uniqueness is simply a representation of the existence as it is present in everything there is. Our mind is complex because all the matter that is connected to it, demands it to be. But in its purest form its singular. Just like any other matter. Looking at it that way, may implicate that galaxies have a conciousness as well. Imagine how complex... Maybe these are gods... or simply another representation of the same existence.

[mandru]

Beautifully assembled Anti-Theist eye candy. 

An excellent example demonstrating the full spectrum regarding The Tyranny of Experts.  Notice how this video portrays (historically) the concept that spiritual leaders were tyrants denying that there was anything other than an absolute Divine Connection of the Earth, man, and everything under the heavens.

But through time and study, natural sciences have revealed a broader understanding of the genuine nature of the universe and natural law.

That said Science in the name of the Holy Church of all seeing/seeking Science has positioned its sole self increasingly as the new Tyrant to diminish the value of humanity (and the individual) to little more than an unfortunate infestation wherein the self appointed leaders of the new Church will eventually be allowed to direct the necessary culling of undesirables to save the elite chosen.

There are many (accepted as scientifically) "true facts" that over time have eventually been unseated and replaced with truths that are supported by more current discoveries and deeper understanding of cosmology.  Scientists are far more forgiving of evolving facts within their own faith than they will ever allow changing perceptions within non-accountable in scientific beliefs.

What concerns me is when political science grabs up the reins directing society and tries to propound that there is no truth.
*Cole Porter's "Anything Goes"
*Tears For Fears "Everybody Wants To Rule The World"


The crown and mantle of conceit and tyranny has simply changed heads and still carrying a grudge. 


I don't feel a need to convince anyone of anything.  So the following (for my own vanity as it's been a while since I've enjoyed stretching my literary legs and creating a sizable post) is my deeper line of thinking and really only my thought processes and not essential reading for anyone who wants to  skip it.

Spoiler

I refuse to choose between Science and my spirituality.  I don't believe that one nullifies the other.  I am seriously interested in fundamental truths so when I take a break from monitoring current p0L!t!cs my T.V. is typically running in the background switched over to one of the Science channels.

I look at the (scientifically accepted) given Cosmological history.  When I follow the logical progression of "dozens to the power of dozens" of documented occurrences that individually should have blocked the basic foundational conditions needed for this place (this Earth) to exist.

Then for life to form I start adding up the niggling details (each step being a win/fail flip of the coin) that went into adding the luxurious essentials for life to form building up from the minimal foundation of a barren Earth.  We needed Super Novas, Black Holes, enough space between us and neighboring stars (good neighbors only and not super giants or quasars/magnetars) and limited smattering of cosmic rays to stir evolutionary progression.  The evolution of our solar system was an amazing ballet where the two largest gas giants were once deeper inside and they tossed each other out to their respective positions.

Then there's an improbable impactor that hit Earth lightly enough at just the right angle to establish a seasonally favorable tilt without busting up everything and scattering both of us into dust.  To top things off the newly created moon hung around and provides stabilizing influence on Earth's rotation which Mars is totally lacking causing its poles to tumble periodically.  The rise fall of the tides are also a lunar benefit in the from scratch origin of life.

Then there's the drifting continental plates that brought South America up into position to match up with North America.  Without that interruption of the existing sea currents Earth very likely might still have been locked up in the Icehouse state referred to as Snowball Earth which ended somewhere around 650 million years ago.

Looking at how things have come about here on Earth if you take every favorable/unfavorable condition in turn and multiply it by its preceding accumulation of chance it's pure irony that there are far more reasons against us involved than the vast odds Carl Sagan (in this video) refered to from that winning hand of cards he had been dealt.

True there were many possible winning hands that could have been dealt but still we are winners of a cosmic lottery.  We shouldn't exist. 

[BinnZ]

Nice post mandru 

I was also aware of the fact that someone slightly religious or spiritual would find the video a bit harsh on the believers of this world. I am certainly not a believer and I don't find myself very spiritual but I can't deny that there's things in the universe, and ffs beyond it, that don't explain our consciousness.
All life is the result of will. Circumstances and desire, that's all there is to it. Simply reducing that desire to scientific process without 'meaning' is pure ignorance in my opinion. If you think that's all life is you'd better go ahead and kill yourself.

But I do believe that we are not alone. There's probably billions of life forms on other planets. I fantasized about life forms based on other elements, like all sorts of metals and minerals, on a world with super high temperatures. And why not? Everything is possible because the possibilities are endless.
Why not a living star, with memories, desires, ways of procreation.

Why is it so satisfying to connect to someone, out of pure altruism? I think it is because there's powers in the world of existence that we don't yet know, probably never will, that isolate our being within the infinite. We need to relate ourselves to 'the other' and since there's infinity in all directions and dimensions, and relativity on top, we are always the center of our universe.

[fragger]

I'll watch that video tonight. I haven't had a chance yet, but I think I may have already seen it. I think I've watched everything with Sagan's name on it

mandru, It's been too long since you posted something like that, I've missed it

Regarding your opening "spoiler" point - I don't understand why there is a perception on the part of some people that one can be either spiritual or scientific in one's outlook on things, but not both. Personally, I see no valid basis for such a mutual exclusion, and I think it may even be possible that a thorough understanding of the cosmos (if that is even within our purview at all) may be unattainable without embracing both. I also believe it's possible to be scientifically-minded without being clinical, and spiritually-minded without being dogmatic.

I'd like to stress that I do not equate "religion" with "spirituality". If I say I have a spiritual bent, it doesn't mean that I regularly attend a designated place of worship or that I observe a strict regimen of prayer and ritual. I do none of those things. Religion and spirituality often have little to do with one another, it seems to me. But I've said enough, I'm not going to launch into some theistic diatribe here.

When it comes down to it, there is only one truth. So at some point, science and spirituality have to arrive at the same destination. I believe the route to that destination lies in being able to rid one's self of absolutist thought and never blithely dismissing anything, no matter what one's own system of reasoning may suggest, unless that something can be proven beyond any shadow of doubt one way or the other.

I hate it when someone asks me if I believe in God, because it's a loaded question. My answer will be filtered through that person's own belief system and they will assess my answer based on their own preconceived notions about it. If they believe and I say I don't, I will be considered a lost soul who needs to be "shown the way" and prayed for. If I say I believe and they don't, I'll be considered a gullible fruit loop with porridge for brains. So on the odd occasion when I am asked that question, I'll decline to answer. I'll offer to explain what I do believe if they really want to hear it, but I'm not going to preach at anyone.

When it comes to the nature of thought, consciousness or spirituality, how do we know that there isn't some kind of "spectrum of consciousness", as there is a spectrum of electromagnetism? With our limited visual perception, we can only detect that relatively tiny slice of the EM spectrum which we call "visible light". We can't see radio, infrared, ultraviolet, micro, X- or Gamma rays, yet they are all part of the same spectrum - only difference between them all is the wavelength. But we know they exist because we can detect them with equipment other than our eyes, and we can utilize them. Who is to say that there isn't a spiritual equivalent this, and occasionally the genetic human soup throws up a "freak" of nature, someone born with the mental equivalent of, say, an X-ray detector who can discern parts of a spectrum of consciousness beyond that of most people's abilities? We label such people mediums, clairvoyants, psychics, or lunatics. This could all be bunk. But unless such things can be demonstrably proven to exist or not, they should never be ruled out. Open-minded skepticism is a he@lthy thing, I feel. One should always try to steer a course between gullible acceptance and outright denial. I try to do that, as hard as it can be at times (-cough-"Scientology"-cough-).

I don't like the term, "supernatural". There is only what we understand and what we don't, what we can perceive and what we can't. And the fact is - and I'm sure Sagan would agree - there is a very great deal that we neither understand nor perceive. The existence of "dark matter" for instance has, at present, been no more demonstrably proven than the possibility of "life after death".

[fragger]

Now, regarding the video...

I think it's an audio version of Sagan's book "Pale Blue Dot", read by him but with graphics added by whoever uploaded the video (at 3:46 - people waving Trump signs at a rally is 20 years after Sagan's tenure on the planet came to a lamentable end). It also says "Chapter 2" in the title, so I'm assuming it's taken from an audio-book.

Long ago I rid myself of any illusions of humanity's cosmic exceptionalism. I've been a keen studier of the cosmos from a very early age (one of the first books I can ever remember owning as a kid was about space). I could identify the constellations in my half of the world by the time I was 8. I knew about the structure of the Solar System and I knew about the structure of the atom. I knew the names of all the planets, their satellites, their order of distance from the Sun, and how far away they were from same. I knew what a light-year was and understood that the stars I was seeing at night were not as they are, but as they were, long ago. I knew they were all moving in different directions and that if I went forward thousands of years into the future, the constellations would be unrecognizable. I've been into all this for so long that I tend to forget that not everybody else is. So as an adult, I have been stunned to encounter people - otherwise quite intelligent people - who have been blissfully unaware of the simple fact that the Sun is a star, that all the other stars in the night sky are suns seen at great distance, and that many of those distant suns will have planets of their own orbiting them. I find the lack of general knowledge about the cosmos, even about our own solar system, rather depressing in this supposed enlightened day and age (don't get me started on "flat-earthers") even though I fully understand that such subjects are hardly priorities in peoples' day-to-day lives.

But I have been aware of these things, and think about them so much, that I believe it has liberated me from many of what I might otherwise think of as petty concerns, and when it comes to stuff like politics, even though I like to keep abreast of events, at the same time, in the back of my mind, there is always the lingering awareness that the universe doesn't give much of a toss about what goes on here From a cosmic perspective, such things don't even begin to aspire to meaninglessness (I liked the line in the video - "The Planet of the Idiots" ). The awareness of just how indescribably insignificant we really are can actually be, in an odd way, kind of elevating. We may be tiny, yet we exist, and we can at least try to get to grips with the true nature of things (some of us try, anyway).

"Geocentrism" still persists to an alarming degree, though. It's still inherent in expressions like "down to earth" (as though this is where the only reality is) and "outer space" (it's all "out there" and we're somehow insulated from it). Old habits die hard, and nobody likes to think that their lives are minute and meaningless. But as soon as you can begin to acknowledge how infinitesimal you are, the more you will begin to cherish the preciousness of tenuousness of life.



Related to Sagan, and the notions of just how small we are: Below is a link to one of my favourite opening sequences to a movie, 1997's Contact. I wasn't real keen on the movie itself, but I love this opening sequence (even though they don't get the correlation of radio broadcasts to distance right. The idea was sound, though). The novel by Carl Sagan upon which the movie is based was far superior to the movie (which was released only about a year after Sagan's death) and had an epilogue which featured one of the coolest concepts I've ever come across as a mathematical hypothesis. I'm glad he didn't get to see this interpretation of his book actually, I think he would have been a tad disappointed. I was. But we do have this cool opening

[Art Blade]

nice.

[fragger]

Someone worked this out, and it's pretty awe-inspiring. To get an idea of interstellar distances:

Imagine the Sun scaled down to the size of a golf ball. On this scale, Earth would be about the size of a grain of sand, and would be about 4 metres (roughly 13 feet) away from the golf ball.

The nearest star to our Solar System is the red dwarf star, Proxima Centauri, which, on the scale we're using, would be about the size of a pea. How far away would it be?

Place the pea about 1,200 kilometres away from the golf ball.

That's how far. And that is the nearest star. In reality, the distance is about 40,000,000,000,000 kilometres (40 trillion), or about 4.2 light-years.

Yet on a galactic scale, that's a trifling distance. On our "golf ball" scale, our galaxy would be about 30 million kilometres across. In actual un-scaled distance, it's about one quintillion kilometres in diameter - 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 kays. Roughly. Or, if you like, about 100,000 light years.

An Apollo-era spacecraft, which travelled at around 40,000 kph, would take over 100,000 years to reach Proxima Centauri. The New Horizons space probe, which travels at 84,000 kph, would take about 54,000 years. The fastest man-made object so far, the Juno probe, reached (over time via gravitational assists) a maximum speed of about 250,000 kph. At that speed, Juno would take about 18,000 years to reach Proxima Centauri.

These figures are all approximate, but not far off.

And you thought it was a long walk down to the corner shop...

[Art Blade]

from an ant's point of view, it is.

nice post, fragger Shows how bloody unlikely it is for us (manned space travel) to ever even leave our solar system, let alone to "explore space."

[Dweller_Benthos]

Exactly, without some kind of near-magic mode of transportation, ie, Star Trek's warp drive, there is no way to "explore space" in the way it's represented in most popular fiction. That's not to say some kind of near-magic transportation isn't possible, but it seems very very unlikely.

[Art Blade]

agree.. even if we managed to achieve near speed of light, not to mention warp speed, we'd most likely run through tons of debris, even dust particles would be dangerous if not lethal. If you go in a straight line at near speed of light and ram an asteroid or even a planet.. no chance to decelerate in time to prevent a lethal crash. In other words, even if we travelled at enormous speeds, we'd not survive it thanks to all the *bleep* in our way.

[BinnZ]

So we will need to find out how to enter hyper space, like in the Jack Vance stories

[fragger]

I suspect that if interstellar travel is possible, it will involve some esoteric trick of quantum mechanics, something like the "folding of space" in the Dune novels - "travelling without moving" - essentially bringing your current location space and the destination space together in some hyperdimensional manner, inserting yourself into the destination space, then letting it snap back to "normal" space with you in it. Actually moving through space at hyperluminal velocities is probably a physical impossibility for a living organism, or if possible, fraught with a crazy amount of risk. Like Art said, even a collision with a speck of dust at a relativistic speed could be catastrophic.

[Art Blade]

I suppose that type of hyperdimensional travel is nothing short of teleportation that might as well w0#k on our own planet. There's an underrated film showing a related kind of travel, called Xchange with Stephen Baldwin, quite funny actually.