EXIBIT A
The Sun is halfway through its life-cycle now, and will die in about 5 billion years.
But by then it’s likely the solar system will have been dismantled anyway, since in about 3 billion years our galaxy, the Milky Way, will collide with Andromeda.
Of course by then there won’t be any “us, earthlings” to feel sorry for. We’ve only been there for a few million years and are unlikely to be there for much longer. We can hazard guesses as to whether we’re going through our species’ mid-life crisis or going out in a supernova bang, the truth is, no one knows.
All the better since if we DID know, there’d be nothing we could do with that knowledge.
What we do know, however, but seem to forget 27/7, is that we are nothing.
Just a pale blue dot
There. Squint. Halfway up the last beam on the right. Check us out.
And that’s only from 6 million kilometers, a distance short enough for our best friend and best ally in the War Against Futility, Ladies and Gentlemen, the one and only, VOYAGER 1, a man-man “object”, to reach travel and follow his pal Carl Sagan’s instructions, that is, “turn round Voy, and see if you can catch a photo of us. Can you see me? i’m waving my arms.. here.. no? “.
February 14, 1990. Became known as the Pale Blue Dot photograph. Takes Valentine’s Day to a whole new level, does it not? We’ll be celebrating this photograph’s twentieth anniversary in a few days. Remember that as you smooch under the stars.
Carl then went and wrote his book of the same name, and tried to sober us all up, which is every good astronomer’s job.
“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 in 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 the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. 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. It is up to us. It’s been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, 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 and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”
Amen.
Carl was a good man. He was part of the team behind the Arecibo message, our call-out to hypothetical sentient beings out there. Which brings us to the question: how do you communicate to hypothetical sentient beings out there? For all i know this
might mean “come and exterminte us please, we’re fucking it up. thanks” in Messier13-ian. Or hopefully “please could you abduct : (cue list of right-wing politicians and cringe-bad pop stars)”.
That pretty picture above is of course a schematic rendition of the actual message, which was sent once on Nov 16, 1974, and actually reads
0000001010101000000000000101000001010000000100100010001000100101100101010
1010101010100100100000000000000000000000000000000000001100000000000000000
0011010000000000000000000110100000000000000000010101000000000000000000111
1100000000000000000000000000000000110000111000110000110001000000000000011
0010000110100011000110000110101111101111101111101111100000000000000000000
0000001000000000000000001000000000000000000000000000010000000000000000011
1111000000000000011111000000000000000000000001100001100001110001100010000
0001000000000100001101000011000111001101011111011111011111011111000000000
0000000000000000010000001100000000010000000000011000000000000000100000110
0000000001111110000011000000111110000000000110000000000000100000000100000
0001000001000000110000000100000001100001100000010000000000110001000011000
0000000000001100110000000000000110001000011000000000110000110000001000000
0100000010000000010000010000000110000000010001000000001100000000100010000
0000010000000100000100000001000000010000000100000000000011000000000110000
0000110000000001000111010110000000000010000000100000000000000100000111110
0000000000010000101110100101101100000010011100100111111101110000111000001
1011100000000010100000111011001000000101000001111110010000001010000011000
0001000001101100000000000000000000000000000000000111000001000000000000001
1101010001010101010100111000000000101010100000000000000001010000000000000
0111110000000000000000111111111000000000000111000000011100000000011000000
0000011000000011010000000001011000001100110000000110011000010001010000010
1000100001000100100010010001000000001000101000100000000000010000100001000
0000000001000000000100000000000000100101000000000001111001111101001111000
The Arecibo message will reach M13 in 25,000 years. Ok, so it wasn’t really sent to reach a sentient being, and it probably won’t, and if it does “they” probably won’t be able to read it, and if “they” do “they” will probably go “right, and? you guys autodestructed 23.482years ago.”
But.
There is something deeply inspiring about such an act, symbolically. It is pure madness and showoff, and yet.. It’s a small attempt at making sense, by a team of people who know, in their hearts and their minds, that we don’t. That we’re a precarious and arrogant accident, and that no amount of faith can excuse our fuckups.
AND YET…
EXIBIT B
Just because the speed of light is very high does not mean we can forget it.
Wherever you look, you look into the past.
It’s already gone.
All. Just as humans try and communicate by thinking then asking the brain to translate the thought into language then language into sound then uttering the thought then the sound travelling to the Other then the Other hearing the sound, the Other computing the data of the sound, the Other’s brain attempting to transmute the data into thought, a thought that will be different from the one we had, because it is another brain, another soul, another One; the same way all we perceive has lost part of its essence in translation. It’s fine, it doesn’t mean we should shut up and close our eyes. But it does mean that we know much less than we like to pretend.
Everything we take for granted can be questioned. Apart from the fact that we are insignificant and overblown. So, no, you don’t really need that new jacket.
And by now maybe Eta Carinae has already exploded.
But we’ll have to wait millions of years before we see it.
EXIBIT C
(counter-argument)
neurons
universe