The pale blue dot

All life is about evolving, accepting our faults .Questioning authority has led the most imaginative and brainy minds to the guillotine. It all started because of a man named Giordano Bruno. The first of his kind to take an initiative leap that inspired the brainwashed minds out of the dark ages. The founding father of astrophysics of the 16^th century was shackled to chains by the church. While the church was busy posing his views , Bruno wondered that if his god is boundless , how can his creation be finite . He had visions , the revelation of this immensity was like falling in love . He couldn’t snap out of it . He wandered the kingdoms, crossed mighty oceans to speak about his visions which were ultimately ridiculed . Expressing an idea that didn’t conform to traditional belief could land you in deep trouble which was exactly what happened. He was burnt alive in the Vatican city and ten years after the incident, Galileo first looked through a telescope.

And why do I write this? Well, this lucky guess of Bruno is the founding base of all branches of science. Everything that we have learned about science started off because of a single visionary idea. Science is merely a tool , a torch if you may . The passing of a torch from a teacher to a student and so on , a community of minds reaching back to antiquity .Discovering wonders yet undreamt of . We humans, as a species have merely lived for a few thousand years on this planet have gotten to known so much about ourselves on a microscopic as well as grand scale. To know that the elements of your body were forged in a huge supernova is breathtaking. To know that the precious diamond that you crave for is a piece of rock that settled below the crust for years is a different thing altogether. I feel humility lies in knowing that the rock below my foot has just as much importance as me in this cosmic cycle. The dew drops on the grass, the snowflakes on people are made of the same elements that I am.

Here’s something to make you realize how microscopic and petty things we fret over . Carl Sagan , was a member of the voyager 1’s imaging team and it was his idea that Voyager 1 take one last picture as it was descending into the abyss of space. To take a picture of earth as a planet without borders. He convinced NASA to turn the camera back towards Earth for one last time when it went beyond Neptune, roughly some 6 billion kilometers away for one last look homeward at what he called “The Pale Blue 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 ,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 this 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 leaders and emperors so that in glory they can become momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner . How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another over petty things like borders, money. Our imagined self-importance , the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe are challenged by this point of pale light . In our obscurity, in all this vastness there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. We as humans have the responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and with the planet as well. To put the environment before economy and to preserve, cherish the only home that we have ever known.