Pale Blue Dot

Carl Sagan es, sin duda, uno de los más grandes comunicadores de ciencia de todos los tiempos. Es mucho su legado y mucho lo que nos enseña. Esta es la segunda vez que lo leo y sigue siendo alucinante y esclarecedor. Es difícil de describir el impacto que tienen en mí cada una de sus obras.
Una lectura obligada para cualquier persona que quiere una perspectiva diferente y educada. Su promoción de la ciencia nos contagia con su visión y no nada más científicamente hablando sino también a ser mejores personas. Este libro nos lleva a través de un recorrido por nuestro Sistema Solar y en los últimos capítulos Carl nos cuenta sus especulaciones de nuestro futuro y su deseo de ver a los seres humanos reanudar sus exploraciones nómadas al colonizar Marte, asteroides y aventurarse en el Universo.
El punto azul pálido nos da una perspectiva muy necesitada sobre nuestro lugar en el Universo. Carl fue muy atinado en pedir a los controladores del Voyager 1 (al estar a una distancia récord de 6 mil millones de km en febrero de 1990 -lo más lejos que cualquier otro objeto terrestre en ese momento-) que voltearan la probeta para tomar una foto de la Tierra mostrándola como una mota o punto de luz casi imperceptible debido al fulgor del Sol..
"Desde este lejano punto de vista, la Tierra puede no parecer muy interesante. Pero para nosotros es diferente. Considera de nuevo ese punto. Eso es aquí. Eso es nuestra casa. Eso somos nosotros. Todas las personas que has amado, conocido, de las que alguna vez oíste hablar, todos los seres humanos que han existido, han vivido en él. ..."

1) ''From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest.
But for us, it's different. 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, ever 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.''

2) ''Then there's Martian virtual reality: The data sent back from Mars, stored in a modern computer, are fed into your helmet and gloves and boots. You are walking in an empty room on Earth, but to you you are on Mars: pink skies, fields of boulders, sand dunes stretching to the horizon where an immense volcano looms; you hear the sand crunching under your boots, you turn rocks over, dig a hole, sample the thin air, turn a corner, and come face to face with...whatever new discoveries we will make on Mars---all exact copies of what's on Mars, and all experienced from the safety of a virtual reality salon in your hometown. This is not why we explore Mars, but clearly we will need robot explorers to return the real reality before it can be reconfigured into virtual reality.''

3) ''I think the experience of living on other worlds is bound to change us. Our descendants, born and raised elsewhere, will naturally begin to owe primary loyalty to the worlds of their birth, whatever affection they retain for the Earth. Their physical needs, their methods of supplying those needs, their technologies, and their social structures will all have to be different.
A blade of grass is commonplace on Earth; it would be a miracle on Mars. Our descendants on Mars will know the value of a patch of green. And if a blade of grass is priceless, what is the value of a human being? The American revolutionary Thomas Paine, in describing his contemporaries, had thoughts along these lines: 'The wants which necessarily accompany the cultivation of a wilderness produced among them a state of society which countries long harassed by the quarrels and intrigues of governments had neglected to cherish. In such a situation man becomes what he ought to be. He sees his species...as kindred.'''

4) ''If our long-term survival is at stake, we have a basic responsibility to our species to venture to other worlds.
Sailors on a becalmed sea, we sense the stirring of a breeze.''

5) ''The Cosmos extends, for all practical purposes, forever. After a brief sedentary hiatus, we are resuming our ancient nomadic way of life. Our remote descendants, safely arrayed on many worlds through the Solar System and beyond, will be unified by their common heritage, by their regard for their home planet, and by the knowledge that, whatever other life may be, the only humans in all the Universe come from Earth.
They will gaze up and strain to find the blue dot in their skies. They will lover it no less for its obscurity and fragility. They will marvel at how vulnerable the repository of all our potential once was, how perilous our infancy, how humble our beginnings, how many rivers we had to cross before we found our way.''