Philosophy Friday: A Higher Viewpoint

On February 14th 1990, Valentines Day, the space probe Voyager 1 turned its high-resolution narrow-angle camera towards the inner solar system to take a series of photos. One of them captured a fascinating image of Earth. By this time, Voyager 1 was an astounding 6.4 billion kilometres away. In the photo, our planet shows up as a tiny point of light, not even illuminating an entire pixel. The astronomer Carl Sagan called it our ‘pale blue dot’.

That pale blue dot is our home. It’s where we all live. Throughout the ages, all people were born there and died there.

Our collective insignificance in the cosmos is deafening.

All our petty squabbles happen on this dot—all our wars and fights over land and resources.

Two thousand four hundred years ago, the Greek philosopher Plato had devised a thought experiment with a similar, humbling, effect. Imagine yourself flying high above the ground. What would you see? You would observe no individual people, no political boundaries, none of the things we often get so worked up over or spend our time chasing.

Sometimes we need a higher viewpoint to humble ourselves, realise how insignificant we all are and to refocus our efforts from the trivial and divisive onto the collective and important. We all call the pale blue dot our home.

“How small a part of the boundless and unfathomable time is assigned to every man! For it is very soon swallowed up in the eternal. And how small a part of the whole substance! And how small a part of the universal soul! And on what a small clod of the whole Earth you creep!” – Marcus Aurelius