Thoughts on Valentine's Day

Sorry, no hearts and flowers today. This Valentine's Day it seems particularly appropriate to share Carl Sagan's iconic Pale Blue Dot monologue, especially since NASA has recently updated (reprocessed) the original Voyager 1 photograph. For now, this pale blue dot is all we have. We need to take better care of it. That means we need to do better caring for each other. We're all in, and on, this together. It's past time we Get Together.

Enlarged version of the new Pale Blue Dot release. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)

    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.

    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. The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

Residence on Earth

By Arthur Sze

As we approached the front door, I noticed

grills on the windows, bullet pockmarks

in the wall; inside, a maid served us salad,

potato and cilantro soup—and I saw,

in the amphitheater above Medellín,

the stage where twenty-eight poets read;

clouds gathered; in the ensuing downpour,

I expected the five thousand people to rush out;

instead, a sea of umbrellas appeared,

and people swayed under them; when the readings

resumed, a poet stood, chanted in Vietnamese,

and when I stepped up to the podium,

two rivers flowed down the steps to the far right

and left; as I read our emotions resemble leaves

and alive to their shapes we are nourished, 

I understood how poets from all over the world

had come for peace, solidarity, justice—

and when my host, and reader of my poems

in Spanish, invited me into his home, I saw

one way to live during our residencia en la tierra.

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Please be kind to each other while you can.