Take a look at the photo 🌌. It almost looks like a photo taken by an amateur stargazer. Grainy streaks of sunlight.
But this photo was taken in 1990 and was not taken from Earth. A machine took it, the right technical term being space probe. It was called Voyager 1, and it was launched in 1977. Voyager 1 traveled 13 years and 6 billion kilometers into deep space, very, very far from home, to take that photo using instruments that were cutting-edge in 1977.
Let’s look at the photo again. Notice that streak of light towards the right side of the photo. Zoom into the photo, and you can see a very bright pixel somewhere around the middle. Looks blueish and could easily be dismissed as an overexposed pixel.
That’s Earth! 🌏
Carl Sagan, in his book Pale Blue Dot comments on what he sees as the greater significance of the photograph, writing
From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider again 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.
Why am I talking about this?
There was a phase that I went through where I questioned everything. I came across this photo and quote by Carl Sagan, and it greatly impacted me.
It started off with “Nothing we do matters“. A phase of fuck it attitude towards life and everything. The mote of dust we are on can be wiped off by a rock or radiation. Then why even care? Thankfully, that phase didn’t last. Realised that I do love and care about some things in my life. Things I don’t care about might be something others care about. Because I believe in something, I cannot ask someone to think and act like me. (Except when it comes to tech and designs). Let them be. Everybody has “stuff” they care about and crap to deal with. You might not even be aware of that. The best I can be is not to become another cause of worry they have to deal with.
These days, I try to leave everything in a better state than I found it – people, relationships, places, pieces of code. It keeps me happy and satisfied mentally. More often than not, things do not pan out that way. As human beings, we are flawed. Mistakes happen, and I try to fix them as much as possible. But most of the time, I’m a fucking goldfish. (Thanks to Ted Lasso, there’s a word for it now!)
💥 Boom!, light bulb 💡 moment!
So thanks to Voyager 1 and that photo, at any given time, I don’t, and I do give a sh-t about things. Like the famous cat in the box! 🐈📦☠️
The difference between the cat and me? I’m pretty sure I’m alive. Or am I?
./J