Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

دوباره به آن نقطه نگاه کن. آن نقطه همین‌جاست. آن نقطه خانه است. آن نقطه ماییم. بر روی آن هر که را دوست داری، هر که را که می‌شناسی، هر آن که تابه‌حال نامش را شنیده‌ای، هر انسانی که تاکنون بوده است، زندگی‌شان را سپری نموده‌اند. جمعِ تمامی خوشی‌ها و رنج‌هایمان، هزاران دین مطمئن، ایدئولوژی‌ها و دکترین‌های اقتصادی، هر شکارچی و گردآورنده‌ای، هر قهرمان و بُزدلی، هر خالق و نابود‌کننده‌ی تمدنی، هر شاه و رعیتی، هر زوج جوان عاشقی، هر مادر و پدری، هر بچه امیدواری، هر مخترع و کاشفی، هر معلمِ اخلاقی، هر سیاست‌مدار فاسدی، هر «فوق ستاره‌ای»، هر «رهبر کبیری»، هر قدّیس و گنه‌کاری در تاریخ گونه‌ی ما آن‌جا زندگی کرده است، بر روی ذرّه‌ی گردی معلّق در یک شعاع نور

زمین صحنه بسیار کوچکی در عرصه‌ی وسیع گیتی است. به رودهای خونی که توسط ژنرال‌ها و امپراتورها ریخته شده تا باافتخار و پیروزمند، بتوانند اربابان زودگذر جزئی از یک نقطه شوند، به بی‌رحمی‌های بی‌شماری که از ساکنان یک‌گوشه‌ی این نقطه علیه ساکنان مشابه گوشه‌ای دیگر سرزده بیندیش، چه مکرّر است عدم تفاهم‌های‌شان، چه مشتاق‌اند به کشتن یکدیگر، چه پُر‌حرارت است نفرت‌های‌شان

رفتارهای‌مان، خودبزرگ‌بینی خیالی‌مان، توّهم این که یک جایگاه ویژه در عالم داریم، توسط این نقطه کم‌نور به چالش کشیده شده است. سیاره ما یک ذرّه‌ی تنهای احاطه‌شده در تاریکی عظیم کیهانی است. در گمنامی‌مان، در تمامی این وسعت، هیچ نشانی از این نیست که کمکی از جایی برای نجات از دست خودمان برسد

زمین تنها دنیای شناخته‌شده‌ای است که تاکنون زندگی را پناه داده است. هیچ کجای دیگری نیست، حداقل در آینده نزدیک که گونه‌ی ما بتواند به آن مهاجرت کند. سر زدن، شاید اقامت هنوز خیر. چه خوشتان بیاید چه نه، در حال حاضر آخرین و تنها سنگر ما زمین است

گفته شده است که نجوم تجربه‌ی متواضع‌کننده و شخصیت‌ساز است. شاید هیچ اثباتی برای حماقتِ غرور بشری بهتر از این تصویرِ دور، از دنیای کوچکمان نباشد. برای من، این تأکیدی بر مسئولیتمان است که با یکدیگر مهربان‌تر رفتار کنیم و نقطه آبی کم‌رنگ، تنها خانه‌ای که تاکنون شناخته‌ایم را گرامی داشته، محافظت نماییم

When I was a child, my most exultant dreams were about flying – not in some machine, but all by myself. I would be skipping or hopping, and slowly I could pull my trajectory higher. It would take longer to fall back to the ground. Soon I would be on such a high arc that I wouldn't come down at all. […] In the dream – which I must have had in its many variations at least a hundred times – achieving flight required a certain cast of mind. It's impossible to describe it in words, but I can remember what it was like to this day. You did something inside your head and at the pit of your stomach, and then you could lift yourself up by an effort of will alone, your limbs hanging limply. Off you'd soar.

I know many people have had similar dreams. Maybe most people. Maybe everyone. Perhaps it goes back 10 million years or more, when our ancestors were gracefully flinging themselves from branch to branch in the primeval forest. A wish to soar like the birds motivated many of the pioneers of flight, including Leonardo da Vinci and the Wright brothers. Maybe that's part of the appeal of spaceflight, too.

We were wanderers from the beginning. We knew every stand of tree for a hundred miles. When the fruits or nuts were ripe, we were there. We followed the herds in their annual migrations. We rejoiced in fresh meat; through stealth, feint, ambush, and main-force assault, a few of us cooperating accomplished what many of us, each hunting alone, could not. We depended on one another. Making it on our own was as ludicrous to imagine as was settling down. […]

For 99.9 percent of the time since our species came to be, we were hunters and foragers, wanderers on the savannahs and the steppes. There were no border guards then, no customs officials.

But not until 1837 did direct observations of the stars prove in the clearest way that the Earth is indeed circling the Sun. The long-debated annual parallax was at last discovered – not by better arguments, but by better instruments. […]

Since scientists are people, it is not surprising that comparable pretensions have insinuated themselves into the scientific worldview. Indeed, many of the central debates in the history of science seem to be, in part at least, contests over whether humans are special. Almost always, the going-in assumption is that we are special. After the premise is closely examined, though, it turns out – in dishearteningly many cases – that we are not.

As time passed, as the human exploratory capacity hit its stride, there were surprises: Barbarians could be fully as clever as Greeks and Romans. Africa and Asia were larger than anyone had guessed. The World Ocean was not impassable. There were Antipodes. Three new continents existed, had been settled by Asians in ages past, and the news had never reached Europe. Also the gods were disappointingly hard to find.

Who discovered that CFCs posed a threat to the ozone layer? Was it the principal manufacturer, the DuPont Corporation, exercising corporate responsibility? Was it the Environmental Protection Agency protecting us? Was it the Department of Defense defending us? No, it was two ivory-tower, white-coated university scientists working on something else – Sherwood Rowland and Mario Molina of the University of California, Irvine. Not even an Ivy League university. No one instructed them to look for dangers to the environment. They were pursuing fundamental research. They were scientists following their own interests. Their names should be known to every schoolchild.

In their original calculations, Rowland and Molina used rate constants of chemical reactions involving chlorine and other halogens that had been measured in part with NASA support. Why NASA? Because Venus has chlorine and fluorine molecules in its atmosphere, and planetary aeronomers had wanted to understand what's happening there.

Of all the fields of mathematics, technology, and science, the one with the greatest international cooperation (as determined by how often the co-authors of research papers hail from two or more countries) is the field called “Earth and space sciences.” Studying this world and others, by its very nature, tends to be non-local, non-nationalist, non-chauvinist. Very rarely do people go into these fields because they are internationalists. Almost always, they enter for other reasons, and then discover that splendid work, work that complements their own, is being done by researchers in other nations; or that to solve a problem, you need data or a perspective (access to the southern sky, for example) that is unavailable in your country. And once you experience such cooperation – humans from different parts of the planet working in a mutually intelligible scientific language as partners on matters of common concern – it's hard not to imagine it happening on other, nonscientific matters. I myself consider this aspect of Earth and space sciences as a healing and unifying force in world politics; but, beneficial or not, it is inescapable.

[…] motivation to create effective transnational institutions and to unify the human species. It's hard to see any satisfactory alternative.

In our usual jittery, two-steps-forward-one-step-back mode, we are moving toward unification anyway. There are powerful influences deriving from transportation and communications technologies, the interdependent world economy, and the global environmental crisis. The impact hazard merely hastens the pace. […]

انظر مرة أخرى
إلى النقطة الزرقاء الباهتة التي تحدثنا عنها في
الفصل السابق تأملها جيدا بنظرة طويلة.
وبتحديقك في هذه النقطة لأي فترة زمنية مهما
كان طولها حاول أن تقنع نفسك أن الله قد خلق
الكون كله من أجل نوع واحد من العشرة ملايين
نوع أو نحو ذلك من أنواع الحياة التي تسكن ذرة
الغبار تلك. والآن لنتقدم خطوة أخرى أبعد: تخيل
أن كل شيء قد صُنِعَ من أجل نكرة وحيد من هذا
النوع أو الجنس أو من أجل عرق ما أو دين ما
وإذا لم تتأثر بذلك وهو أمر غير مرجح فعليك
باختيار نقطة أخرى وتخيَّل أنها مأهولة بشكل
آخر من أشكال الحياة الذكية. يتعلق أصحابها أيضا
بفكرة أن الله خلق كل شيء من أجلهم ولصالحهم.
تُرى بأي قدر من الجدية ستتناول زعمهم هذا?

ومع كل نواقصنا ورغم قصورنا وافتقادنا للعصمة فإننا نحن البشر قادرون على إنجاز أشياء عظيمة.