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Consider again that pale blue dot we've been talking about.
Imagine, that You take a good long look at it.
Imagine You are staring at the dot for any length of time.
And then try to convince Yourself,
that God created the whole Universe
for one of the 10 million or so species of life
that inhabit that speck of dust.
Now take it a step further:
Imagine that everything was made just for a single shade of that species,
or gender, or ethnic or religious subdivision.
If this doesn't strike you as unlikely, pick another dot.
Imagine it to be inhabited by a different form of intelligent life.
They too cherish the notion of a God who has created everything for their benefit.
How seriously do you take their claim?
Our ancestors lived out of doors.
They were as familiar with the night sky as most of us
are with our favorite television programs. The Sun, the Moon, the stars, and the planets
all rose in the east and set in the west,
traversing the sky overhead in the interim.
The motion of the heavenly bodies was not merely a diversion.
For hunters and gatherers, as well as for agricultural peoples,
knowing about the sky was a matter of life and death.
How lucky for us that the Sun, the Moon, the planets and the stars
are part of some elegantly configured cosmic clockwork!
It seemed to be no accident. They were put here for a purpose, for our benefit.
Who else makes use of them? What else are they good for?
And if the lights in the sky rise and set around us, isn't it evident
that we're at the center of the Universe?
These celestial bodies - so clearly suffused with unearthly powers,
especially the Sun on which we depend for light and heat -
circle us like courtiers fawning on a king.
Even if we had not already guessed, the most elementary examination
of the heavens reveals that we are special.
The Universe seems designed for human beings.
It's difficult to contemplate these circumstances without experiencing
stirrings of pride and reassurance. The entire Universe, made for us!
We must really be something.
This satisfying demonstration of our importance, buttressed by daily
observations of the heavens, made the geocentrist conceit a transcultural truth -
taught in the schools, built into the language, part and parcel
of great literature and sacred scripture.
Dissenters were discouraged, sometimes with torture and death.
It is no wonder that for the vast bulk of human history
no one questioned it.
Aristotle, Plato, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas,
and almost all the great philosophers and scientists of all cultures
over the 3,000 years ending in the seventeenth century,
bought into this delusion.
Some busied themselves figuring out how the Sun,the Moon, the stars and the planets
could be cunningly attached to perfectly transparent,crystalline spheres,
that would explain the complex motions of the celestial bodies
so meticulously chronicled by generations of astronomers.
Never mind how many kings, popes, philosophers, scientists, and poets
insisted on the contrary, the Earth, through those millennia, stubbornly
persisted in orbiting the Sun.
You might imagine an uncharitable extraterrestrial observer
looking down on our species over all that time.
With us excitedly chattering: "The Universe is created for us!
We're at the center! Everything pays homage to us!"
And concluding that our pretensions are amusing,
our aspirations - pathetic,
that this must be the planet of the idiots.
But such a judgment is too harsh.
We did the best we could. There was an unlucky coincidence between everyday
appearances and our secret hopes.
We tend not to be especially critical
when presented with evidence that seems to confirm our prejudices.
Philosophy and religion cautioned that the gods, or God, were far more powerful than we,
jealous of their prerogatives and quick to mete out justice
for insufferable arrogance. At the same time, these disciplines had not a clue
that their own teaching of how the Universe is ordered
was a conceit and a delusion.
Every other proposal, and their number is legion,
to displace us from cosmic center stage, has also been resisted,
in part for similar reasons. We seem to crave privilege,
merited not by our work, but by our birth.
By the mere fact that, say, we are humans and born on Earth.
We might call it the anthropocentric, the "human-centered", conceit. This conceit
is brought close to culmination in the notion that we are created in God's image:
The Creator and Ruler of the entire Universe
looks just like me. My, what a coincidence!
How convenient and satisfying!
The sixth-century-B.C. Greek philosopher Xenophanes understood the arrogance
of the perspective. Here's what he said:
"The Ethiopians make their gods black and snub-nosed; the Thracians say
theirs have blue eyes and red hair . . . Yes, and if oxen and horses or lions
had hands, and could paint with their hands, and produce works of art as men do,
horses would paint the forms of the gods like horses, and oxen - like oxen."
The immense distances to the stars and the galaxies mean
we see everything in space in the past, some as they were
before the Earth came to be. Telescopes are time machines.
Long ago, when an early galaxy began to pour light out into the surrounding
darkness, no witness could have known that billions of years later some remote
clumps of rock and metal, ice and organic molecules would fall together
to make a place called Earth. Or that life would arise and thinking beings evolve,
who would one day capture a little of that galactic light, and try to puzzle out
what had sent it on its way.
And after the Earth dies some 5 billion years from now,
after it is burned to a crisp or even swallowed by the Sun,
there will be other worlds and stars, and galaxies coming into being,
and they will know nothing of a place once called Earth.
Those worlds in space are as countless as all the grains of sand
in all the beaches of the Earth. Each of those worlds is as real as ours.
In every one of them there is a succession of incidents, events, occurences, which influence its future.
Countless worlds, numberless moments, an immensity of space and time.
And on our small planet, in this moment, here we face a critical branch point
in history. What we do to our world, right now, will propagate down to the
centuries and powerfully affect the destiny of our descendants.
It is well within our power to destroy our civilisation and, perhaps, our species as well.
If we capitulate to superstition or greed, or stupidity, we can plunge our world
into the darkness deeper than a time beetween the collapse of classical
civilisation and the Italian Renaissance.
But we are also capable of using our compassion and our intelligence, our
technology and our wealth to make abundant and meaningful life for every
inhabitant of this planet; to enhance enormously our understanding of the universe
and to carry us to the stars.