Pale Blue Dot

After being smitten by Carl Sagan’s exquisite and erudite storytelling in The Demon-Haunted World, I looked around for more of his work and found the Pale Blue Dot, and it’s exactly what I had expected it would be.

It took me a lot of time to complete this book but that’s because I stopped listening to audiobooks for a while early this year. Luckily, it’s written in a loosely related anthological manner so I could pick this book up after an absence of let’s say a month and still wouldn’t miss out on anything or find the need to read the better part of the previous chapter. Nor did I take too many notes while listening to it. It’s the kind of book that I just enjoyed reading/listening to, whether that be while doing chores, cooking, running, etc. In the first half of the book, from Voyager to Apollo, and beyond, the author traces the miraculous achievements we humans have had and continue to have in astronomy and cosmology. It sets a backdrop for what’s about to come next in the book, the future of humans in space and our quest for survival.

Perhaps it is recency bias but I quite enjoyed the second part of the book. Here, the author talks about concerns regarding sending humans to space and how governments across the globe are cutting down on space research budgets. But, the author continues, that an inevitable future awaits where humans achieve multi-planetary existence and how rather ironically that would be humanity’s only hope for survival in the long term future. But it also raises important and difficult questions. In particular, how our future existence as a multi-planetary species will fare where we’d have to inhabit and take care of various planets when we are hell-bent on ruining our current and only one.

That the book was published in 1994 is telling. It’s a poignant reminder of who we are as humans. We are innovators. We are survivors. We find a way to survive, we always have, despite the odds stacked against us. Our descendants, thousands of years into the future, conveniently cooped up in their cloche establishments on distant planets, would fondly look back on this pale blue dot, if it manages to survive.