As is so often the case, the late great Douglas Adams had a relevant quote:
"And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex — just to show her.
And into one end he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and into the other end he plugged his wife: so that when he turned it on she saw in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it.
To Trin Tragula’s horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain; but to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion."
I feel like one should already have this understanding of cosmic insignificance from multiple kinds of knowledge that I remember encountering in grade school.
Just looking up and knowing those are not just stars but full galaxies. Learning a little about geological time spans versus paleontology versus written human history. From those, it should be obvious already just how ephemeral our lives are in time and space.
I got another (fractal?) feeling of insignificance when I realized "ancient" poets, philosophers, and historians were describing basically the same emotional and metaphysical concerns that we grapple with today. We cram some extra modern knowledge into our heads, but the fundamental cognitive life isn't really changing much.
Reminds me the Earth rise photo from Apollo 8, that every human being, except the three in the CM, was in that photo. Add to that that every human being anyone ever heard of, and all their ancestors, down to the first cell, lived on that globe.
The Pale Blue Dot is an incredible image but actually understates our cosmic insignificance. Voyager 1 hadn’t left the Solar System at the time and is still light years from our nearest stellar neighbors. Even our farthest stellar neighbors—the individual stars that form constellations in our night sky—are situated in just one section of the Orion arm of the Milky Way. And the Milky Way is, of course, just one galaxy among hundreds of billions.
There are a number of videos that try to show the scale on YouTube, but I'm a big fan of the one by Cody's Lab where he has a drive to proxima centauri, IIRC.
I've recently been reading the Pensees, so it feels timely that this article was posted. I'll add here a couple more practical pieces of advice that Pascal offers for dealing with what he considers the wretchedness of human experience:
"One must know oneself [reference to Socrates]. If this does not serve to discover truth, it at least serves to regulate one's life, and there is nothing better"
"Physical science will not console me for the ignorance of morality in the time of affliction. But the science of ethics will always console me for the ignorance of the physical sciences."
"Because of the way that sunlight is scattered off the
spacecraft, the Earth seems to be sitting in a beam of light, as if there were some special importance to our small planet. But this is just an accident of geometry and optics. The Sun emits its radiation equitably to all directions in space."
Also, from the posted article itself:
"Indeed, even the hint of perceptual salience – the sunbeam in which Earth is suspended – isn’t a genuine feature of Earth’s position in the cosmos but an artefact of the image itself."
Imagine giving a animal a mirror that then turns into a map that allows them to zoom out to pale blue dot levels. The ability to be shook by that , would be interesting who has that.
Other people will occasionally verbalize the same kind of thoughts that I've had yet never spoken aloud. That's enough to make me accept that we're at least thinking in the same way.
"When you are put into the Vortex you are given just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it a tiny little marker, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says 'You are here'."
Obviously, everyone generates feelings in different ways. However, Pale Blue Dot I would hope generates feeling that we're all on this rock together. We're all human and we should all be on the same side of working together for our species.
Astronauts that have seen earth from afar get a profound feeling of love for Earth and humanity, and that we're all in this together (should be all in this together).
There is a beautiful scene about this that articulates it well. It is a NASA documentary about a female astronaut that sees Earth from space for the first time. I wish I could find which movie it is.
The Egyptian-Greek-Roman notions of the cosmos and their related Judeo-Christian-Islamic religious traditions seem to have a much harder time accepting the scientific revelations of the depths of time and space than Buddhist and Hindu philosophies, which have vast notions of time (though perhaps not space) baked in, eg:
> "Imagine a great mountain of solid iron, one hundred leagues high and wide. If once every hundred years a man were to brush it lightly with a cloth, the mountain would be worn away before a kalpa ends. And yet many kalpas have already passed." (Buddhist Sutra description of a kalpa)
As secularism became more prevalent in Europe and America, some new voices appeared - eg, HP Lovecraft, one of the first writers to really dive into the consequences of the discovery of the immensity of time and space. It's likely difficult for people who've been taught their entire lives that they're the entire point of existence and the most significant element in a cosmic story, to have material scientific reality make such a mockery of that notion, and indeed many have thus fled from that 'deadly light' into what Lovecraft called 'the peace and safety of a new dark age.'
This is definitely not true from a philosophical level. Contemplation of an infinite god/cosmos, and the seemingly infinite nature of time are core aspects of early Greek philosophy, which heavily influenced the philosophy of each of the Abrahamic religions.
As you started alluding to, the reason the west may seem more fearful of the infinite is likely because of widespread secularism, not western religion. An infinite cosmos is not nearly as scary to someone whose life purpose is appeasing an all good/infinite/timeless/immutable being, as it is for someone whose life purpose is managing their dopamine levels.
Somewhat related: being someone who grew up in the west, I've always wondered how Hindus and Buddhists deal with evidence of the big bang. It fits fairly naturally into Abrahamic traditions that believe in a beginning to the universe. Though, it is fairly important to the philosophy of those eastern traditions that time and space (samsara) has no beginning or end.
As much as I always appreciated the essay, the image seemed to engender the exact opposite feeling in myself; an overwhelming sense that this really is all that matters. There is no meaning for humans to be found "out there". Only this, only us. We will all be born, live, and die on this rock. And all we have in this entire universe is the other primates inhabiting it with us, and the collective meaning that we can create for ourselves together to distract from that fact. Anything else is delusional fantasy.
And that's what I could extract from Carl Sagan's reflections of that image. This lone spec of dust is all there is for us. Make of it all you can, because this is all there will ever be.
I wonder how anyone else could interpret it otherwise.
I’ve never understood the “cosmic insignificance” feeling either, Pale Blue Dot is a picture of all the joy and wonder in the (accessible) universe and I get live on it? I feel gratitude at these images.
I learnt it the hard way that not everyone appreciates the beauty of our cosmic insignificance. Most people are fully immersed in this tiny world we built and I sometimes envy them.
My problem with these immersed people of this world is that it’s like being residents of a terrarium, entirely at the mercy of the Lord to keep the A/C on. We need few people to wonder what is out there - who is maintaining the terrarium temperature?
Maybe we really are so insignificant that ultimately it doesn't matter. So, we might as well make the most of the time we have here!
Speaking for myself... Some of us care about this little spec of dust, so we try to challenge those who want to destroy the planet. We like making cool stuff, building little empires, and also making our communities fun and thriving!
We didn't build this world though. If anything it built us. And everywhere we look there's depth to it, whether we contemplate the stars, the worlds inside ourselves, or mundane earth events like a glance over clinked glasses when you fell in love...
Here's some Borges:
"Tennyson said that if we could understand a single flower we would know who we are and what the world is. Perhaps he meant that there is no deed, however so humble, which does not implicate universal history and the infinite concatenation of causes and effects. Perhaps he meant that the visible world is implicit, in its entirety, in each manifestation, just as, in the same way, will, according to Schopenhauer, is implicit, in its entirety, in each individual.
The central fallacy is that size has to do with significance. It is a huge non sequitur and grist for the deepity mill to conclude that just because Earth is tiny in comparison to the Universe in terms of size that it must therefore be insignificant.
Is life, specifically intelligent life, signiant on a cosmic scale?
If so there’s a strong chance that Earth is the most significant place in the galaxy at least. It’s possible we’ll screw ourselves up before we make it to other star systems, but of we do manage self sustaining interstellar ships then within a cosmically tiny amount of time humans, or the evolved dwacwndents, will occupy every star in this galaxy.
Maybe that’s common, maybe that’s insignificant on a universal scale, maybe reaching the level of development humans have is quite common, but it’s quite possible that Earth is, or will be, very significant on a galactic scale if nothing else.
Maybe. Maybe not. We really just don’t know. If sentient life is vanishingly rare on a cosmic scale then there would some significance to Earth (currently). But it is otherwise pretty insignificant.
Even if we’re significant on a galactic scale, that’s a long way from cosmic significance. Even our galaxy is pretty insignificant on that scale.
I think it does. It’s not proof that this place is insignificant, but the fact that it’s just a tiny dot in an unimaginably vast universe is strongly suggestive.
Compare with a hypothetical universe consisting of a million-kilometer-diameter crystal sphere with the Earth at its center. Again not proof, but absent any further information, one would reasonably conclude that Earth is much more significant in that universe.
Dunno. The crystal sphere wouldn’t tell me anything. If I’m the kind of life form that requires such sphere in order to evolve in the first place, then of course I’d observe such a sphere around my planet— otherwise I wouldn’t be there to observe anything!
If I lived on such a planet, I might say, well, I’d need a big sun-like outer gas giant in order to prove we’re significant. As it is, we’re just a little crystal sphere in a huge universe.
What he was saying is if the total universe was merely a few million kilometers, the earth would form a much larger and non-trivial portion of it compared to the vast size of the observable universe in real life.
There is no cosmic perspective. There's only my perspective, your perspective, and so on. Perhaps there are alien perspectives, and from their perspective, their world is very significant.
When you talk about significance, you have to bring in considerations of value and worth. And at that point, you have to bring in the individual. Significance is only significant to someone.
It might be that a lot of people just aren't well enough primed to appreciate the pale blue dot as it isn't recognizable enough.
This is why, despite current controversy and how fun it is to mock Katy Perry, space tourism is so important, particularly when it gets to the point of Low Earth Orbit.
Being able to see the whole entire planet in detail right out the window apparently has quite the psychological effect.
Dissociation and viewing your existence as nothing is not beautiful and it's definitely not honorable. Our existence is the realest we're going to get. Your life is 100% of your universe dawg, act like it.
Space is barely even real to us earth critters lol
Ok, why are you acting like you're contradicting OP when the two viewpoints necessarily go together?
If the rest of the universe cares about us, we need to live our lives for the rest of the universe. If we're cosmically insignificant, then what's here and now is what matters, and what we have to live for.
To you. I find a great amount of beauty in appreciating how small and unlikely our existence is - in how important it is to us, and how unimportant it is to the rest of the entire universe.
For real, I wouldn't consider myself an anthropcentrist, but Earth might be the only planet with agency, with a noosphere [1]. This gotta place it in the, like, top 10 of all planets in the Universe, at least.
As is so often the case, the late great Douglas Adams had a relevant quote:
"And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex — just to show her.
And into one end he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and into the other end he plugged his wife: so that when he turned it on she saw in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it.
To Trin Tragula’s horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain; but to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion."
I feel like one should already have this understanding of cosmic insignificance from multiple kinds of knowledge that I remember encountering in grade school.
Just looking up and knowing those are not just stars but full galaxies. Learning a little about geological time spans versus paleontology versus written human history. From those, it should be obvious already just how ephemeral our lives are in time and space.
I got another (fractal?) feeling of insignificance when I realized "ancient" poets, philosophers, and historians were describing basically the same emotional and metaphysical concerns that we grapple with today. We cram some extra modern knowledge into our heads, but the fundamental cognitive life isn't really changing much.
> not just stars but full galaxies
https://esahubble.org/images/heic0611b/
Take in this picture for cosmic insignificance, and then check out what JWST did a couple of years ago.
No, the stars you see are all in our galaxy. The most visible galaxy (to the unaided eye) is Andromeda.
Reminds me the Earth rise photo from Apollo 8, that every human being, except the three in the CM, was in that photo. Add to that that every human being anyone ever heard of, and all their ancestors, down to the first cell, lived on that globe.
The Pale Blue Dot is an incredible image but actually understates our cosmic insignificance. Voyager 1 hadn’t left the Solar System at the time and is still light years from our nearest stellar neighbors. Even our farthest stellar neighbors—the individual stars that form constellations in our night sky—are situated in just one section of the Orion arm of the Milky Way. And the Milky Way is, of course, just one galaxy among hundreds of billions.
There are a number of videos that try to show the scale on YouTube, but I'm a big fan of the one by Cody's Lab where he has a drive to proxima centauri, IIRC.
I spent countless hours in Celestia flying idly between the limited set of exoplanets available back then.
The fallacy here is confusing scale for significance. Is a nucleus insignificant to an atom?
When I see this, I interpret it the opposite: precisely because we are tiny and alone(?) we are more significant.
I've recently been reading the Pensees, so it feels timely that this article was posted. I'll add here a couple more practical pieces of advice that Pascal offers for dealing with what he considers the wretchedness of human experience:
"One must know oneself [reference to Socrates]. If this does not serve to discover truth, it at least serves to regulate one's life, and there is nothing better"
"Physical science will not console me for the ignorance of morality in the time of affliction. But the science of ethics will always console me for the ignorance of the physical sciences."
What exactly is the “sunbeam” in the Pale Blue Dot? Is it a real astronomical phenomenon or an imaging artifact?
The "sunbeam" in Pale Blue Dot is imaging artefact indeed! From <https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/solar-system-portrait-ear...>:
"Coincidentally, Earth lies right in the center of one of the scattered light rays resulting from taking the image so close to the sun."
See also <https://www.loc.gov/resource/mss85590.042/?sp=17>:
"Because of the way that sunlight is scattered off the spacecraft, the Earth seems to be sitting in a beam of light, as if there were some special importance to our small planet. But this is just an accident of geometry and optics. The Sun emits its radiation equitably to all directions in space."
Also, from the posted article itself:
"Indeed, even the hint of perceptual salience – the sunbeam in which Earth is suspended – isn’t a genuine feature of Earth’s position in the cosmos but an artefact of the image itself."
>the sunbeam in which Earth is suspended – isn’t a genuine feature of Earth’s position in the cosmos but an artefact of the image itself.
Toward the end of the article.
Stanley Kubrick messed that one up and turned up one of the stage lights too high.
EDIT: Guys... I'm kidding, c'mon.
It is a common misconception. A pale blue dot does not generate a feeling; you do. Or don't; it is a choice.
Imagine giving a animal a mirror that then turns into a map that allows them to zoom out to pale blue dot levels. The ability to be shook by that , would be interesting who has that.
The other existential question I've asked is, "How do I know any of you are conscious?" It may be in fact, that I am the only one who is conscious.
This is known as "the problem of other minds" in philosophy
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/other-minds/
Other people will occasionally verbalize the same kind of thoughts that I've had yet never spoken aloud. That's enough to make me accept that we're at least thinking in the same way.
The next question would then be why are you singled out?
The lack of any reason for that makes it seem quite unlikely in my book :)
Given the nature of evolution it is improbable that we are much different in that way.
I just spoke with a bunch of conscious people at our solipsism meetup!
I have this image as the wallpaper on my phone. Weirdly calms me down when I get anxious about something trivial.
Same here, nothing like cosmic insignificance to calm the nerves. Glad I’m not alone!
Right. Well can we have your liver then?
"When you are put into the Vortex you are given just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it a tiny little marker, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says 'You are here'."
Obviously, everyone generates feelings in different ways. However, Pale Blue Dot I would hope generates feeling that we're all on this rock together. We're all human and we should all be on the same side of working together for our species.
Astronauts that have seen earth from afar get a profound feeling of love for Earth and humanity, and that we're all in this together (should be all in this together).
There is a beautiful scene about this that articulates it well. It is a NASA documentary about a female astronaut that sees Earth from space for the first time. I wish I could find which movie it is.
The Egyptian-Greek-Roman notions of the cosmos and their related Judeo-Christian-Islamic religious traditions seem to have a much harder time accepting the scientific revelations of the depths of time and space than Buddhist and Hindu philosophies, which have vast notions of time (though perhaps not space) baked in, eg:
> "Imagine a great mountain of solid iron, one hundred leagues high and wide. If once every hundred years a man were to brush it lightly with a cloth, the mountain would be worn away before a kalpa ends. And yet many kalpas have already passed." (Buddhist Sutra description of a kalpa)
As secularism became more prevalent in Europe and America, some new voices appeared - eg, HP Lovecraft, one of the first writers to really dive into the consequences of the discovery of the immensity of time and space. It's likely difficult for people who've been taught their entire lives that they're the entire point of existence and the most significant element in a cosmic story, to have material scientific reality make such a mockery of that notion, and indeed many have thus fled from that 'deadly light' into what Lovecraft called 'the peace and safety of a new dark age.'
This is definitely not true from a philosophical level. Contemplation of an infinite god/cosmos, and the seemingly infinite nature of time are core aspects of early Greek philosophy, which heavily influenced the philosophy of each of the Abrahamic religions.
As you started alluding to, the reason the west may seem more fearful of the infinite is likely because of widespread secularism, not western religion. An infinite cosmos is not nearly as scary to someone whose life purpose is appeasing an all good/infinite/timeless/immutable being, as it is for someone whose life purpose is managing their dopamine levels.
Somewhat related: being someone who grew up in the west, I've always wondered how Hindus and Buddhists deal with evidence of the big bang. It fits fairly naturally into Abrahamic traditions that believe in a beginning to the universe. Though, it is fairly important to the philosophy of those eastern traditions that time and space (samsara) has no beginning or end.
The description of a kalpa made me think of the "Heaven Sent" episode of Dr Who:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaven_Sent_(Doctor_Who)
so just to be clear on this one , we, who get to postulate something as all encompasing as cosmic significance, dont have it?
As much as I always appreciated the essay, the image seemed to engender the exact opposite feeling in myself; an overwhelming sense that this really is all that matters. There is no meaning for humans to be found "out there". Only this, only us. We will all be born, live, and die on this rock. And all we have in this entire universe is the other primates inhabiting it with us, and the collective meaning that we can create for ourselves together to distract from that fact. Anything else is delusional fantasy.
And the non-primates! Also living lives full of suffering and joy.
And that's what I could extract from Carl Sagan's reflections of that image. This lone spec of dust is all there is for us. Make of it all you can, because this is all there will ever be.
I wonder how anyone else could interpret it otherwise.
I’ve never understood the “cosmic insignificance” feeling either, Pale Blue Dot is a picture of all the joy and wonder in the (accessible) universe and I get live on it? I feel gratitude at these images.
> There is no meaning for humans to be found "out there".
Except for long-term survival.
> Only this, only us. We will all ... die on this rock.
Literally only if you think that Earth is all that matters.
I learnt it the hard way that not everyone appreciates the beauty of our cosmic insignificance. Most people are fully immersed in this tiny world we built and I sometimes envy them.
We're just upright spear monkeys. We're supposed to be immersed in this world.
I fear that might be true for majority of humans.
My problem with these immersed people of this world is that it’s like being residents of a terrarium, entirely at the mercy of the Lord to keep the A/C on. We need few people to wonder what is out there - who is maintaining the terrarium temperature?
I look at it a different way.
Maybe we really are so insignificant that ultimately it doesn't matter. So, we might as well make the most of the time we have here!
Speaking for myself... Some of us care about this little spec of dust, so we try to challenge those who want to destroy the planet. We like making cool stuff, building little empires, and also making our communities fun and thriving!
We didn't build this world though. If anything it built us. And everywhere we look there's depth to it, whether we contemplate the stars, the worlds inside ourselves, or mundane earth events like a glance over clinked glasses when you fell in love...
Here's some Borges:
"Tennyson said that if we could understand a single flower we would know who we are and what the world is. Perhaps he meant that there is no deed, however so humble, which does not implicate universal history and the infinite concatenation of causes and effects. Perhaps he meant that the visible world is implicit, in its entirety, in each manifestation, just as, in the same way, will, according to Schopenhauer, is implicit, in its entirety, in each individual.
What you do today, will affect all living creatures on this entire planet.
(and I could say the same on any day, and it would still be true)
But ok... usually one person's daily actions aren't significant enough to be noticed by more than a handful of others.
The central fallacy is that size has to do with significance. It is a huge non sequitur and grist for the deepity mill to conclude that just because Earth is tiny in comparison to the Universe in terms of size that it must therefore be insignificant.
Easy! It's both significant and insignificant!
This has always been my takeaway. Our cosmic insignificance reminds us just how significant what we have is.
Exactly!
It's equally fallacious to conclude that Earth must be significant just because it's where you and everyone you know happen to live.
Well it’s certainly significant to its inhabitants, perhaps the single most significant place in the universe (to inhabitants of Earth).
From a cosmic perspective, however, it is rather insignificant.
Of course, the idea of “significance” is pretty meaningless without context or a perspective, so naturally it ends up being quite subjective.
Is life, specifically intelligent life, signiant on a cosmic scale?
If so there’s a strong chance that Earth is the most significant place in the galaxy at least. It’s possible we’ll screw ourselves up before we make it to other star systems, but of we do manage self sustaining interstellar ships then within a cosmically tiny amount of time humans, or the evolved dwacwndents, will occupy every star in this galaxy.
Maybe that’s common, maybe that’s insignificant on a universal scale, maybe reaching the level of development humans have is quite common, but it’s quite possible that Earth is, or will be, very significant on a galactic scale if nothing else.
Maybe. Maybe not. We really just don’t know. If sentient life is vanishingly rare on a cosmic scale then there would some significance to Earth (currently). But it is otherwise pretty insignificant.
Even if we’re significant on a galactic scale, that’s a long way from cosmic significance. Even our galaxy is pretty insignificant on that scale.
I think the point is that the pale blue dot doesn’t really provide any relevant information on the subject of our significance (or lack thereof).
I think it does. It’s not proof that this place is insignificant, but the fact that it’s just a tiny dot in an unimaginably vast universe is strongly suggestive.
Compare with a hypothetical universe consisting of a million-kilometer-diameter crystal sphere with the Earth at its center. Again not proof, but absent any further information, one would reasonably conclude that Earth is much more significant in that universe.
Dunno. The crystal sphere wouldn’t tell me anything. If I’m the kind of life form that requires such sphere in order to evolve in the first place, then of course I’d observe such a sphere around my planet— otherwise I wouldn’t be there to observe anything!
If I lived on such a planet, I might say, well, I’d need a big sun-like outer gas giant in order to prove we’re significant. As it is, we’re just a little crystal sphere in a huge universe.
What he was saying is if the total universe was merely a few million kilometers, the earth would form a much larger and non-trivial portion of it compared to the vast size of the observable universe in real life.
Ah. Yep. I skipped the part about the universe being tiny.
Humans are the only thing we know of that assigns signifiance to anything
What’s your point?
There is no cosmic perspective. There's only my perspective, your perspective, and so on. Perhaps there are alien perspectives, and from their perspective, their world is very significant.
When you talk about significance, you have to bring in considerations of value and worth. And at that point, you have to bring in the individual. Significance is only significant to someone.
Probably that significance isn't an inherent quality of things.
absolutely unhinged take
If you were a dung beetle crawling along the sands of the Sahara, would you be concerned about what's happening at the bottom of the Marianas Trench?
It might be that a lot of people just aren't well enough primed to appreciate the pale blue dot as it isn't recognizable enough.
This is why, despite current controversy and how fun it is to mock Katy Perry, space tourism is so important, particularly when it gets to the point of Low Earth Orbit.
Being able to see the whole entire planet in detail right out the window apparently has quite the psychological effect.
Dissociation and viewing your existence as nothing is not beautiful and it's definitely not honorable. Our existence is the realest we're going to get. Your life is 100% of your universe dawg, act like it.
Space is barely even real to us earth critters lol
Ok, why are you acting like you're contradicting OP when the two viewpoints necessarily go together?
If the rest of the universe cares about us, we need to live our lives for the rest of the universe. If we're cosmically insignificant, then what's here and now is what matters, and what we have to live for.
To you. I find a great amount of beauty in appreciating how small and unlikely our existence is - in how important it is to us, and how unimportant it is to the rest of the entire universe.
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[flagged]
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Unless you are a mod, please don't "dismiss shallowly" my comment by quoting rules to me. My comment was substantive.
dang is a moderator of HN
For real, I wouldn't consider myself an anthropcentrist, but Earth might be the only planet with agency, with a noosphere [1]. This gotta place it in the, like, top 10 of all planets in the Universe, at least.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noosphere
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