Rock of Ages

In 1990, the renowned astronomer Carl Sagan asked Nasa for a favour. At the time, the interplanetary probe Voyager I, which had been launched 13 years earlier, was on its way out of the solar system and over six billion kilometres from us. He requested the space agency to command the probe to take a photograph of Earth. By then, however , our world was so far away that it appeared like a tiny speck, less than one pixel in size — “a pale blue dot” in the black vastness of space. Yet, Sagan was so moved by it that he wrote: “If you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That’s home. That's us... every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every 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.” Yes, in many senses, an image like this can be an amazingly humbling experience because everything suddenly snaps into perspective.

But does it mean the actual business of living also becomes insignificant or irrelevant? No, because the dispassionate image doesn’t tell the whole story. The story of how even while being next to nothing in the unimaginable immensity of all creation we can look back on ourselves and say in that minute space we were still able to achieve such a lot. That such a little planet could harbour so much passion. That no matter how small we are in the gigantic scale of things — we still rock!