My World View

"Jayhawk Jake" (jayhawkjake) 08/09/2016 at 22:13 • Filed to: None

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I’d say I’m not posting this for any particular reason, but that would be a lie. I’m not going to go into any further detail about why I’m posting it because it’s honestly irrelevant.

That out of the way, I’d like to take a moment to discuss how I view the world.

I grew up in Houston, Texas. Sometimes called ‘Space City’. I eventually went to school and got a degree in Aerospace Engineering. As a result, I’ve had the privilege of meeting quite a few astronauts. I want to say my ‘count’ is upwards of 10, but I don’t know for sure.

I’ve also always been fascinated by space exploration, and I’ve found that as I’ve grown older that has come to mean different things to me. Most recently I feel that space exploration puts the world into perspective in a very special way.

The best illustration of this is the Pale Blue Dot. Carl Sagan wrote a book titled the same as the picture, and it’s a fantastic book. The picture is nothing short of breathtaking: After Voyager 1 passed Saturn, Sagan had an idea. What if we spin the craft around, pointing it roughly at Earth, and snap a picture? It probably won’t have much value, there won’t be anything to see. From that distance the Earth would be very small, if visible at all.

With much debate and many delays, NASA finally took the picture despite the risk to Voyager’s camera by pointing towards the general area of the Sun. It took a picture, and it’s a picture that I feel not enough people have seen:

You see that pale blue dot? Not the circle, but inside the circle?

That’s us. That’s the Earth.

You know how people say a picture is worth a thousand words? One could write millions of words on the significance of this picture Fortunately for us the late Carl Sagan was quite the wordsmith, so here is what he had to say:

We succeeded 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, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every 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 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 in 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 the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. 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.

[...] To my mind, 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 and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

— Carl Sagan, speech at Cornell University, October 13, 1994

That last paragraph never fails to make me choke up. That’s my world view.

In the universal sense the Earth is so small, so insignificant. On the 14 billion year timescale that is the history of matter, humanity isn’t even a blink of an eye.

From this perspective, all of our squabbles are pointless. When discussions of race, religion, and politics arise I always find myself disappointed at the end. We aren’t white, we aren’t black. We aren’t jews, we aren’t christians, we aren’t muslims. We aren’t men, women, Americans, Russians...we are humans. People. Why do we feel a need to label it, and fight over those labels? Why do we make assumptions about individuals based on their appearance, their beliefs, their home?

Our home is Earth. An infinitesimal speck in an infinite cosmos. Nothing more, nothing less.

Edgar Mitchell is another individual who summarized this view well. He walked on the Moon on Apollo 14, and unfortunately passed away just this year. When he viewed the earth from the Moon he made what is now a very well known observation:

“You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch’.”

He’s not the only astronaut to have that sentiment. I can’t seem to find the clip, but in the IMAX documentary “Space Station 3D” a Russian cosmonaut has a similar observation. He says something to the effect of ‘from up here, there are no borders’.

One of the handful of astronauts I’ve had the pleasure of meeting is Sandy Magnus. She flew on the final Shuttle launch and spent some time on the ISS. She described seeing the thin line of the Earth’s atmosphere from orbit like seeing the thin shell of an egg. It’s fragile, and precious. And we need to take care of it, protect it from harm, so future generations can thrive

I can’t forget these perspectives. I don’t view other people as manifestations of their race, gender, or background. Frankly I don’t care. To me, we’re all just humans, floating around on this fragile, pale blue dot. It really hurts when someone tries to paint a picture of me based on my appearance, or my religion, or my gender, or my nationality. I am an individual, as we all are, just another member of insignificant human race.

Be excellent to each other.

OPPOsaurus WRX > Jayhawk Jake 08/09/2016 at 22:21

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We aren’t white, we aren’t black. We aren’t jews, we aren’t christians, we aren’t muslims. We aren’t men, women, Americans, Russians...we are humans

that is one of the problems is many people dont see it like that. Some douche blows up some third would fruit stand and no one cares but those are still people dying even if they dont have a facebook profile.

i was reading something about the first moon landing and it touched upon how when the astronauts returned they had a sort of depression from seeing the world from such an outside point of view. interesting stuff

also screw you I wanna be an astronaut. good luck

Daily Drives a Dragon - One Last Lap > Jayhawk Jake 08/09/2016 at 22:24

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I completely agree. I always end up coming back to the fact that our world is just so small compared to the universe. It’s honestly stunning and every time it just makes me sad but also kinda gives me hope. What sort of hope, I don’t know but...........

Bman76 (no it doesn't need a WS6 hood) M. Arch > Jayhawk Jake 08/09/2016 at 22:31

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Couldn’t agree more. When I was in Prague I shared an apartment with: a Mexican guy, a Chinese guy, a French guy, a Russian girl, and a Slovenian girl. We were all just people living together, we played cards, we partied, we cooked and ate dinner together. People (in the U.S. especially) often fail to look past the small differences and see the huge similarities.

yamahog > Jayhawk Jake 08/09/2016 at 22:35

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It really hurts when someone tries to paint a picture of me based on my appearance, or my religion, or my gender, or my nationality.

We are 100% on the same page there. Unfortunately, ignoring each others’ differences won’t make the oppression against them due to those differences magically vanish.

Also, if you’re a Sagan fan, it’s unfortunate to note that even among the skeptic community he founded along these ideals of universal compassion, people are not always excellent to each other:

http://www.slate.com/articles/doubl…

Jayhawk Jake > yamahog 08/09/2016 at 22:38

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Yeah, part of the problem with this type of view is it’s easy to stop with ‘just ignore differences’.

I really intend for it to be more along the Edgar Mitchell line of thought: I want everyone to gain this perspective. We’ll never fix prejudice, unfortunately. Even if we could magically make everyone look the same, there’d always be something people would fight about. But I think it’s important to try and give people the worldview that space travel has afforded, because it makes most of our differences seem petty

Jake - Has Bad Luck So You Don't Have To > Jayhawk Jake 08/09/2016 at 22:42

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Fairly Odd Parents had an article where Timmy Turner was tired of people judging based on appearance so he wished for everyone to be turned into identical grey blobs, which led to the same bigots that judged on appearance to arbitrarily declare themselves the “greyest and the blobbiest” and verbally abuse the same people.

Fuckin’ kids shows, man.

Sam > Jayhawk Jake 08/09/2016 at 22:59

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Here’s the excellent rendition from the new Cosmos.

iSureWilll > Jayhawk Jake 08/09/2016 at 23:40

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100% with you on this. People that seem so different are also the same as you. We are all human.

This is the kind of talk I wish the “* Lives Matter” groups would be having. Instead of all the division we need to find unity.

RallyDarkstrike - Fan of 2-cyl FIATs, Eastern Bloc & Kei cars > Jayhawk Jake 08/10/2016 at 00:30

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Off to bed, but 100% agreement mate - well said and quoted. That Sagan speech never fails to choke me up either, especially when listening to the audio/video versions on Youtube.

Same with just watching the video/animation linked with the audio from Mars Curiosity’s landing. We, as a species can do some amazing things when we put out minds to it...

RallyWrench > Jayhawk Jake 08/10/2016 at 01:23

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Humanity should meditate on this daily. I don’t understand how anyone can look at the stars and feel otherwise. I also don’t understand how anyone could feel anything other than disgust for the current state of human affairs when faced with history’s failures and the scale on which our Earthly bullshit doesn’t matter.

VonBootWilly - Likes Toyota, but it's still complicated. > Jayhawk Jake 08/10/2016 at 05:44

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Thanks for this post. Reminds me that other people actually get this. When I feel like the majority of the people around me in daily life just don’t get it. When you see and experience too many closed minded shenanigans daily, it’s hard to keep this perspective yourself.