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Why Pale Blue Dot generates feelings of cosmic insignificance

When we see the Earth as ‘a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam’ what do we learn about human significance?

Look at Pale Blue Dot for 30 seconds and consider the crowning achievements of humanity – the Taj Mahal, the navigational exploits of the early Polynesians, the paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe, the inventions of Leonardo da Vinci, John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, Cantor’s theorem, the discovery of DNA, and on and on and on. Shot by the astronaut William Anders during the Apollo 8 mission in 1968, Earthrise depicts the planet as a swirl of blue, white and brown, a fertile haven in contrast to the barren moonscape that dominates the foreground of the image. One can hear its echo in Joseph Conrad’s novel Chance(1913), in which the narratordescribes ‘one of those dewy, clear, starry nights, oppressing our spirit, crushing our pride, by the brilliant evidence of the awful loneliness, of the hopeless obscure insignificance of our globe lost in the splendid revelation of a glittering, soulless universe.’

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