To paraphrase one of my heroes, Carl Sagan, the earth is a tiny stage in a vast cosmic arena. To paraphrase myself, we're on a veritable mote of dust floating in the immensity of the known Universe. That's it, folks. That's home. That's us. A thin film of life covering a fleck in space. The delusion that we have some privileged place in the infinite black soup is challenged when you bolt your consciousness out a few hundred thousand miles and look back at this small speck. (Or if you happen to be aboard a space taxi traveling out that way, all the easier.) That is the perspective I try to maintain...the distant image of our very tiny world. It enables me to appreciate just how insignificant life on Earth really is. And why it need not be taken nearly as seriously as we usually do...but perhaps much more humorously.
Okay, well maybe one serious observation. Says Sagan: "Think of all the rivers of blood spilled by [history's] 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."
The man had perspective.
The man had perspective.
"Our posturings, our imagined self-importance..." belie the fact that our planet is a mere pale blue dot in the great enveloping void. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits, says Sagan, than this distant image of our little sphere.
In this blog, and in my various other jottings--especially in the humorous vein--I want to give expression to that folly, and help us observe life much more as a comedy than a tragedy. Okay?
