More Than A Little Humbling

    On Valentine’s Day (my favorite holiday) way, way back in 1990, NASA’s engineers re-directed the space-probe Voyager 1, which was 3.7 billion miles from home at the time, so that it could take a photograph of Earth. Pale Blue Dot (as the image is known) represents our planet as a barely perceptible dot 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 the photograph – it was obscured by the smallest of smudges on my computer 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 that I have read online over the years, is that it elicits a feeling 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 – the Taj Mahal, the navigational exploits of the early Polynesians, the paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe, the inventions of Leonardo da Vinci, John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, Cantor’s theorem, the discovery of DNA, From The Golf Room, and on and on and on. 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 Sagan’s 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, something full of life, which is in total 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 abundance and growth, 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.

    History lesson, kids! One account of the feelings elicited by Pale Blue Dot begins in the 17th century, with the French scientist and philosopher Blaise Pascal. C’mon, I know you remember Pascal! He was born in 1623, a mere 14 years after Galileo directed the first telescope heavenwards. Galileo’s observations not only confirmed Copernicus’ heliocentric conception of the solar system and revealed ‘imperfections’ in the celestial bodies (such as the Moon’s craters and mountains), they also revealed countless stars invisible to the naked eye. It was a moment of profound upheaval for humanity’s self-understanding, and many of the reflections recorded in Pascal’s Pensées – a series of notebook jottings published only after Pascal’s death – seem to have been prompted by the new astronomy: “When I consider the short span of my life absorbed into the preceding and subsequent eternity...the small space which I fill and even can see, swallowed up in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I know nothing and which know nothing of me, I confess to sometimes feeling a little terrified, and surprised to find myself here rather than there, for there is no reason why it should be here rather than there, why now rather than then. Who put me here? On whose orders and on whose decision have this place and time been allotted to me?” (from the Honor Levi translation of Pascal’s Pensées, 1995)

    But it is this line from the Pensées: “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me” – that perhaps best captures the feeling of cosmic insignificance. Indeed, the line could well serve as a caption for the Pale Blue Dot. For Pascal, the night sky wasn’t merely awe-inspiring – it was terrifying. And it was terrifying not just because it was infinite, but because it was ‘silent’.

    Pascal doesn’t tell us what he meant by the silence of space, but there is reason to suspect that at least part of the answer is theological. The cosy, well-ordered universe of the Middle Ages was becoming a memory and was being replaced by a universe that was not only vastly bigger but seemed to be ruled by mere chance. “Who put me here?” Pascal asks. “Perhaps no-one,” one can almost hear him answer. The silence of space is the silence of the Universe in response to the question of God.

    Of course, Pascal himself was no atheist, and there are passages in the Pensées that suggest a very different attitude to the vastness of space: “So let us contemplate the whole of nature in its full and mighty majesty, let us disregard the humble objects around us, let us look at this scintillating light, placed like an eternal lamp to illuminate the universe. Let the earth appear a pinpoint to us beside the vast arc this star describes, and let us be dumbfounded that this vast arc is itself only a delicate pinpoint in comparison with the arc encompassed by the stars tracing circles in the firmament.” Pascal goes on to suggest that the very fact that our imagination “loses itself” in the face of such thoughts is itself “the greatest perceivable sign of God’s overwhelming power.”

    But it is Pascal’s terror of space that has reverberated down the ages. One can hear its echo in Joseph Conrad’s novel Chance (1913), in which the narrator describes “one of those dewy, clear, starry nights, oppressing our spirit, crushing our pride, by the brilliant evidence of the awful loneliness, of the hopeless obscure insignificance of our globe lost in the splendid revelation of a glittering, soulless universe.”

    Let’s suppose – just for the sake of argument – that this account goes at least some way towards explaining why Pale Blue Dot elicits the feelings that it does. What, then, should we make of those feelings?

    That, of course, turns on the question of how God’s inexistence would bear on human significance. Many of my friends assume that God is required for cosmic significance. Nothing could really matter in a world without God, and if nothing really matters, then we don’t matter. If that’s the case, then the feelings elicited by Pale Blue Dot wouldn’t be a figment of our imaginations. Instead, they would reveal a profound – and perhaps deeply unsettling – truth: from a cosmic point of view, we really are insignificant.

    But the idea that significance requires God is, at least for a dope like me, deeply puzzling. If the beauty, knowledge and creativity that we see around us does not really matter in and of themselves, how could the addition of God help? Indeed, isn’t it more plausible to suppose that it is God’s presence rather than God’s absence that poses the more serious threat to human significance. After all, the beauty, knowledge and creativity that we’ve produced surely pales in comparison with that traditionally ascribed to God. As a 21st-century psalmist might put it, what is the sum total of human knowledge when set against God’s wisdom? I mean, what is the beauty of the Taj Mahal, Beethoven's 9th Symphony, or the paintings and etchings of Rembrandt when placed against the grandeur of the Horsehead Nebula in the Orion constellation?

    Theology provides one lens through which to view the sense of cosmic insignificance; accounts of our experience of space provide another. Not the space of astronomy and inter-planetary probes, but the space of our ordinary perceptions in our daily lives. 

    Cognitive scientists tell us that ordinary ways of thinking about the vastness of space (and, indeed time) are structured in terms of the human body and its capacities. One sees a door as 10 steps away and the fence as 20 steps away. As we grow and our limbs lengthen, the sense of the space around us also changes. This explains the common experience of visiting your childhood home and neighborhood, and finding them much smaller than expected (my how those high school lockers shrunk). Distances that had required 10 steps to traverse as a child can now be crossed in only five; door frames that once towered high above one’s head can now be reached with ease. 

    But to fully appreciate the limitations of the human body as a scale for nature, you need to cross the Kármán line, the boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and outer space. At its closest, Venus is 162 million miles away. Neptune, at its closest, is 2.7 billion miles from earth. Proxima Centauri, the nearest star, is 4.25 BILLION LIGHT-YEARS away. Taken with an exposure time of over 11 days, the Hubble Ultra Deep Field captured a region of the night sky smaller than a grain of sand held at arm’s length – and yet that photograph depicts around 10,000 galaxies.

    These are unimaginably big numbers. We might be able to recite them, but few of us – other than mathematicians and astronomers, perhaps – can truly grasp them. And note how natural it is to describe understanding in terms of bodily activity – ‘grasping’.

    But if this is what explains our feelings of cosmic insignificance – and it’s likely to be part of the story – then it’s not clear why we should pay too much attention to those feelings. So what if our perceptual experiences cannot accommodate the dimensions of the cosmos? Our perceptual systems have been designed by evolution to help us navigate ordinary life here on Earth, not the vastness of the cosmos. We might be unnerved by the amount of real estate we occupy, but such feelings provide no insight into our cosmic significance.

    The two accounts of Pale Blue Dot that I’ve just mentioned are curiously silent about one crucial feature of the image: it is not just an image of the vast emptiness of space, it is an image of the vast emptiness of space in which we appear. It’s not an image from Earth but an image of Earth. And what might be even more important, at least it was to me, it is an image in which Earth – the very object that provides the context for everything that matters to us – is barely perceptible, no more visually significant than a remote speck.

    In this photograph, Earth is pretty much as unobtrusive, as non-attention-grabbing, as overlook-able as it is possible to be. (Indeed, even the hint of perceptual importance – the sunbeam in which Earth is suspended – isn’t a genuine feature of Earth’s position in the cosmos but an artifact of the image itself.) Pale Blue Dot seems to capture the fact that, from a truly objective point of view – the view from ‘absolutely nowhere’, as we might put it – we aren’t attention-grabbing. And if we aren’t attention-grabbing (it’s natural to assume), then we’re not all that significant.

    But if this account explains why Pale Blue Dot elicits feelings of cosmic insignificance, it also shows why those feelings are not trustworthy. Pale Blue Dot may have been taken from a distance of billions of miles, but it does not provide a “God’s eye” view of the cosmos. It is, of course, an image, and every image conceals as much as it reveals.

    Getting back to the whole Pale Blue Dot and Earthrise thing. 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 it 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 is a different perspective that Carl Sagan talked about: 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” towards Earth, we would have been as attention-grabbing as the scrape of a chair in a performance of a poetry reading. 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 actually are significant? Probably 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. That’s enough to keep us humble.

Write to Peter: magtour@icloud.com