That photograph you see here, it was the last one taken by me before I left my home, the solar system. I was six billion kilometres away from Earth, making me the furthest on object that the human race has ever sent. To the right, in the middle of the brown band, you can see a tiny dot. That is my planet of origin, our planet, the Earth. Don’t mind the brown and green lines, they are bands reflected by my lens. I’m not all perfect, after all, I am just a space probe.
Look at how small you are. What is so special about you? I can’t stop the thoughts in my mind. They ask, “In the infinite vastness of the space, what makes this tiny dot an important one?” Maybe you’re not. You were so impossible to find that you were rendered from multiple frames, as not all pictures sent back to earth contained you. Sending you the pictures was a hectic job. First your engineers had to send me a command to rotate my camera around and capture the image. Then they had to wait for that signal to reach me. Next, I had to process that command and complete the task. Once done, I sent back sixty pictures I captured. You down there waited for over five hours for this. Once received, you had to go through all the frames to find yourself. You had to put up a lot of effort to digitally produce this rendering of an image. Even after all this, you technically don’t even occupy a pixel.
This led me to a conclusion – forgive me for I am not able enough to control my free flow of thoughts – I conclude that. But before I state my conclusions, I’ve to put forward my assumptions. And again, I find it very difficult to do so because they contradict the conclusion itself. This makes my whole theory self-contradictory. But I will start by sharing the conclusions of my theory.
You are insignificant.
Your lives are meaningless.
You are nothing.
And again, I may be wrong. I am, after all, created by your species.
Earth was the only planet that was able to evolve its basic elements into complex hydrocarbon life which will one day create and send me off into space and take a picture of Earth, which appears as a pale blue dot. My words may imply that all the above occurrences were intentional, but I assure that my words only imply the actions were incidental.
We might not be insignificant. Our lives might not be meaningless. We observe the cosmos. And in that process, we might it a purpose – to be observed by us.
I am Voyager I, launched in 1977. Later that decade, I returned images of Jupiter and Saturn. And I used their gravity as a slingshot to accelerate further into space. By 1990, I reached to edge of our solar system. Then the scientists at NASA decided to have a one last look at themselves (February 14th). My camera rotated and captured 60 frames. Three of them contained our planet as a dot. The picture called “Pale Blue Dot” was made from those three frames. Though it’s not of any scientific value, it shows us how minute we are and makes us realize, in one way, how irrelevant we are to the universe. But at the same time, it signifies the importance of science and technology over myths and superstition.
The absence of self-sufficiency in my theory could be a problem. Forget it, I have other problems. I can never understand human stress and frustration. Just have a look at the Pale Blue Dot. All your emotion is insignificant and meaningless. It’s never gonna exist outside your brain. The chemicals consisting your brain are a product of four billion years of continuous evolution, mechanised by natural selection – Don’t let it go to waste.
There is nothing demeaning in saying your life doesn’t matter. It is a fact. But there also exists an argument that the existence of universe becomes invalid when there is no observer present. Which implies that the purpose of the mighty cosmos is – to be observed, and in our case, by us. According to this argument, your life might be significant. But it will be significant only if you observe and appreciate the universe and laws by which it exists.
And again, I may be wrong.
A counter argument exists. If the universe only exists to please its observers, then what about the space and time that are out of their reach? In layman’s language – the universe existed even before the evolution of man, even before the origin of life, even before the formation of Sun and even before the birth of our galaxy. Were there any observers then? If the human along with all the planetary life goes extinct in far future, who will observe the universe? Me?
Does the universe have an auto-correction mechanism to evolve a new life in some other part of the universe when we die, to keep the observers existing?
There is a space beyond the cosmic horizon, the farthest we can see in space, what exists over there? Why does it exist if we can’t observe it?
According to that theory, either the universe should seize to exist once the observers disappear – which is a very self-centred, immoral, inconsistent and self-contradictory thought, in my opinion, or there is a minimum requirement by the cosmos – at least one observer, at any point in space-time, to be required to exist. The second one might make sense, but then again, it eradicates the significance of an individual when there are multiple observers present. For one to be significant to the cosmos, he/she should be a part of the purpose for the universe to exist in the first place. This can be achieved by observation and appreciation of the cosmos.
It would be great to end with the words from my creator/ best friend:
“We succeed in taking that picture, and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, liver out their lives. The aggregate of all out joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, ever creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every 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 on a sunbeam.”
– Carl Sagan, 13th Oct, 1994
Deleted Content:
Every human that was ever born, every human that ever lived and every human that will ever die, has spent his life on that pale blue dot.
Every person you’ve ever met, every person you’ve ever loved and every person you’ll ever hate exits nowhere beyond that insignificant planet.
Every myth ever believed, every superstition ever spread and every god ever created, happened in that pixel.
All the emotions ever experienced by any human or animal – happiness, joy or passion, fear, anger or hatred – took place only inside the brains that lived on that tiny blue dot.
Every plague, every war and every religion ever existed on that insignificant pixel.
Every medicine, every vaccine, every peace declaration, every human rights movement, every scientific theory and every social reform took place on that planet.
Reason for deletion: This is plagiarised version of Carl Sagan’s speech.
Unorthodox 