Cosmic Goosebumps

A few streams merged a few minutes ago to give me a serious case of goose bumps, and a few sentimental tears.

1.  A few weeks ago my 7th & 8th science students watched Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth."  [We were discussing visual display of information to make a point.]  In that movie, Gore shows a picture of Earth - commonly titled 'Pale Blue Dot' - taken from 4 billion miles away by the Voyager 1 spacecraft in 1990. 


2.  We have mid-winter break next week, and the assigned reading the students are taking home is "Twilight At Easter" - which is a chapter from Jared Diamond's gripping book "Collapse."  [please read the book if you have not yet.  We are looking at it to create a graphic/poster that summarizes the information in the chapter]  In this chapter Diamond traces the evidence, as best as we understand it, for the rapid collapse of the society on Easter Island - the eastern most tip of Polynesia, and probably the last to be settled. Diamond's conclusion is that the residents of the island rapidly depleted its resources while making those striking moai (statues) and ahu (platforms) on which they stood.  Once the wood ran out, the islanders could no longer make ocean going canoes, and they were stuck, with their traditional sea-based sources of protein drying up.

Of course, Diamond and Gore are making very similar points about what may be happening right now on Earth.

That's the background.  Now the goose bumps.

3.  While reading* the news this morning (it is quiet, and no one else has woken up yet) I came across this article on the NPR website about the taking of that photograph that Gore used;  this week is apparently the 20th anniversary of that photograph.  Carl Sagan was instrumental in getting that photograph taken; NASA was initially not interested as it had no scientific value.  [*I have not yet heard the audio story, as it is set to run on tonight's All Things Considered.]

Here is what Sagan says of the pale blue dot, in his book Pale Blue Dot

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, 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 the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

[Al Gore was being poetic when he referred to the dot as one pixel; it was actually maybe 6.  Sagan is being poetic about the sunbeam; as the  NPR piece says, it was actually a stray reflection from the spacecraft.]
 
4.  It's Valentine's day this weekend, and the news media feel obliged to run stories about love.  NPR's Morning Edition ran a story from RadioLab that tells us of the blossoming love affair between Carl Sagan & Ann Druyan in 1977 as they worked on the audio-mix that was to go into outerspace on Voyager. 
 
 

The last two items alone are so powerful - bracketing as they do two ends of the Voyager mission. One eagerly looking out into the cosmos. The other wistfully looking back one last time.


In the 20 years since that picture was taken, we've finally begun to glimpse the damage we are doing to our 'Pale Blue Dot' and individuals and groups around the world are doing their best to turn the super-tanker around.

Diamond, in that chapter on Easter Island, asks the question (I'm paraphrasing) "What was the person who cut down the last tree on Easter thinking as he or she did that?" That question has hung with me ever since I first read Collapse.

Re-reading it again this week, I keep asking myself, did the residents of Easter even know there were other humans? If the scientific elite had thought to send a message out into their cosmos, what would they have said? I somehow doubt if they would have even mentioned why the moai were so important to them. I'm guessing that the importance of the moai was so great that it did not even bear mentioning. To explain a God rationally is to acknowledge it is a false god.

And bang!, this morning in the space of one hour I hear of the audio-mix we humans sent out more than 30 years ago, and I read about and see the picture that makes Earth's isolation pale in comparison to Easter's (do look up Easter in a zoom-able online map). And I wonder what would happen if some intelligent life-form ever came upon the Voyager spacecraft, traced it to back to Earth, and then one of them wrote a book about us. What would they describe as our moai that were ultimately responsible for our resource depletion and our society's collapse? What would they say our 'last tree' was? Would they ever figure out what we were thinking?

What we sent out on the Voyager spacecraft is so blissfully unaware of what is to come less than two decades later. In the NPR piece Ann Druyan talks about her brain waves that were recorded for the Voyager project, and how her overwhelming feeling that summer was of being in love. It is so touching to think that the first impression any extra-terrestrial society formed of us would involve that central human emotion.

Yet, Global Warming was already upon us. The early science was beginning to be accepted when Voyager set sail. By 1979 there was a tepid scientific consensus that we'd see the effects by the end of the century. In 1988 the IPCC was formed. Even before Voyager had left solar system our solar system, everything had changed.

To think that Ann Dryuan's and Carl Sagan's children - the incarnation of that love story from the summer of 1977 when their parents worked together on an audio-mix for an unknown intelligence - may live to see sea-level rises that change the shapes of our societies and the relationships between our countries.

It gives me the shivers, it really does.



[I find it fascinating how the 4 threads mentioned above came in 4 different media - DVD, print book, internet news, over-the-air radio.]