Feliz Día Pachamama, Pale Blue Dot

Aunque las celebraciones y re memoranzas de este día deberían de ser parte de nuestra cotidianidad, comparto el mensaje hoy de una de las personas que más admiro, un científico extraordinario y divulgador carismático, el astrobiólogo Carl Sagan, quien logró acercar al público convencional a las maravillas del universo y el gusto por la investigación científica.

Transcribo las palabras que hace 20 años pronunció Sagan al contemplar la fotografía de la Tierra enviada por el Voyager 1 a más de 3,762,136,324 millas de aquí. Es una bella sinopsis de lo frágiles y poderosos que somos, de lo fugaz de nuestras vidas y de lo eterno de nuestra existencia, todo tan simple.

Este es el vídeo, y adjunto está la transcripción.

“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 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. 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.

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.”

“For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love” Carl Sagan.