All of us, in perspective

See that small white dot? That's called Earth. See that smaller, greyer dot adjacent to it? That's the Moon. Seen by NASA's Juno spacecraft from a distance of six million miles, the Earth and Moon are but two tiny dancers on a "very small stage," as Carl Sagan would put it. This cosmic scene, a fleeting moment in space-time, is at once sublime and humbling.

Few have put humankind (and, I daresay, its follies) into better perspective than Dr. Sagan. For him, the third rock from the Sun was a "pale blue dot." On it, he said, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. He observed that: "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.

Indeed. Consider today's presidential race where we witness candidate after candidate strut their certitudes and self-proclaimed divinities before bowed, unthinking crowds. All hail the new Rising Sun, they say, for the Heavens must revolve around them. The delicious irony is that these pitiful playlets of egotism unfold on a planetary rock, Sagan's lonely blue dot, that is adrift in an infinite universe where humanly politics matter not a whit, and never will. The gods must be laughing.