Author's Introduction
- On St Valentine’s Day 1990, NASA’s engineers directed the space-probe Voyager 1 – at the time, 6 billion kilometres from home – to take a photograph of Earth. Pale Blue Dot (as the image is known) represents our planet as a barely perceptible dot serendipitously highlighted by a ray of sunlight transecting the inky-black of space – a ‘mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam’, as Carl Sagan famously put it. But to find that mote of dust, you need to know where to look. Spotting its location is so difficult that many reproductions of the image provide viewers with a helpful arrow or hint (eg, ‘Earth is the blueish-white speck almost halfway up the rightmost band of light’). Even with the arrow and the hints, I had trouble locating Earth when I first saw Pale Blue Dot – it was obscured by the smallest of smudges on my laptop screen.
- The striking thing, of course, is that Pale Blue Dot is, astronomically speaking, a close-up. Were a comparable image to be taken from any one of the other planetary systems in the Milky Way, itself one of between 200 billion to 2 trillion galaxies in the cosmos, then we wouldn’t have appeared even as a mote of dust – we wouldn’t have been captured by the image at all.
- Pale Blue Dot inspires a range of feelings – wonderment, vulnerability, anxiety. But perhaps the dominant response it elicits is that of cosmic insignificance. The image seems to capture in concrete form the fact that we don’t really matter. Look at Pale Blue Dot for 30 seconds and consider the crowning achievements of humanity ... Nothing we do – nothing we could ever do – seems to matter... What we seem to learn when we look in the cosmic mirror is that we are, ultimately, of no more significance than a mote of dust.
- Contrast the feelings elicited by Pale Blue Dot with those elicited by Earthrise, the first image of Earth taken from space. Shot by the astronaut William Anders during the Apollo 8 mission in 1968, Earthrise depicts the planet as a swirl of blue, white and brown, a fertile haven in contrast to the barren moonscape that dominates the foreground of the image. Inspiring awe, reverence and concern for the planet’s health, the photographer Galen Rowell described it as perhaps the ‘most influential environmental photograph ever taken’. Pale Blue Dot is a much more ambivalent image. It speaks not to Earth’s fecundity and life-supporting powers, but to its – and, by extension, our – insignificance in the vastness of space.
- But what, exactly, should we make of Pale Blue Dot? Does it really teach us something profound about ourselves and our place in the cosmic order? Or are the feelings of insignificance that it engenders a kind of cognitive illusion – no more trustworthy than the brief shiver of fear you might feel on spotting a plastic snake? To answer that question, we need to ask why Pale Blue Dot generates feelings of cosmic insignificance.
Author's Conclusion
- Return to the contrast between Pale Blue Dot and Earthrise. Pale Bue Dot reveals something (albeit only a little) of the vastness of the cosmos in which Earth is located; Earthrise conceals this fact. But Earthrise reveals features that are concealed by Pale Blue Dot: Earth’s life-supporting capacities. Neither provide the ‘complete image’ of Earth from outer space – there is no such image.
- Once we appreciate this fact, we can start to consider new perspectives on the question of cosmic significance.
- Here’s one. Suppose that Voyager 1 had been equipped with a device designed to detect consciousness-supporting planets. And suppose that the images produced by this device marked the presence of such planets with bright red pixels. Had Voyager 1 directed its ‘consciousness camera’ Earthwards, we would have been as attention-grabbing as the scrape of a chair in a performance of John Cage’s 4’33”. The feelings generated by Bright Red Dot (as we might call this image) would surely be very different from those elicited by Pale Blue Dot. ‘Small’, the image might seem to say, ‘but enormously significant.’
- Does that mean we are significant? Maybe not. Suppose that we used our ‘consciousness camera’ to map not just our corner of the solar system but the entire Universe. What kind of image might it produce?
- One possibility is that Earth would emerge as the sole red dot in a vast expanse of blackness. (‘Nothing like us anywhere,’ we might say to ourselves with justifiable pride.) But the odds of that are surely low – perhaps vanishingly so. Astronomers suggest that there may be as many as 50 quintillion (50,000,000,000,000,000,000) habitable planets in the cosmos. What percentage of those planets actually sustain life? And, of those that sustain life, what percentage sustain conscious life? We don’t know. But let’s suppose that consciousness is found in only one of every billion or so life-supporting planets. Even on that relatively conservative assumption, there may be as many as 50 billion consciousness-supporting planets. Earth, as viewed through our consciousness camera, would be just one more red dot among a vast cloud of such dots.
- Human creativity might be unmatched on this planet; it may even be without peer in the Orion arm of the Milky Way. But, given the numbers, we’re unlikely to be eye-catching from a cosmic point of view.
Author Narrative
- Tim Bayne is professor of philosophy at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia and co-director of the Brain, Mind, and Consciousness programme of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR). He is the author of The Unity of Consciousness (2010), Thought: A Very Short Introduction (2013), Philosophy of Religion: A Very Short Introduction (2018), and Philosophy of Mind: An Introduction (2022).
Notes
- I suppose it's worth considering issues of cosmic value, but it's easy to fall into Nihilism.
- Is there really any difference between the worries in this paper and those of the individual who thinks of the insignificance his own brief life in the sea of 8bn people on Earth? The author himself cites Blaise Pascal in this regard.
- Each individual is significant in himself; insignificance only arises by comparison with others.
- The problem with significance in the bean-counting sense is that we really have no idea how many civilisations - if any - are 'out there'.
- There are no Aeon Comments, which - I suppose - is a relief; no end of drivel would have been talked.
- I suppose this relates - vaguely - to my Notes on Narrative identity, Naturalism, Religion and Transhumanism.
Comment:
- Sub-Title: "When we see the Earth as ‘a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam’ what do we learn about human significance?"
- For the full text see Aeon: Bayne - Just a pale blue dot.
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