9th
A 5920 millones de kilometros de Parque Chas
El otro día, demasiado cansado para apretar los botones del control remoto, sucumbí frente al televisor a “An unconvenient truth”, la película de Al Gore. Me resistía, previamente, prejuzgandola un truco proselitista y no pudiendo evitar escuchar a los títeres hollywoodenses de Team America babbling sobre “Global Warming, Corporate America”. Baste decir sobre el tema que mi prejuicio no la hace justicia a la película, y que vale la pena verla. Junto con la épica (si, bastante proselitista) de la vida de Al, hay una base fuerte de información presentada de una manera muy depurada. Digno de ver.
Pero si bien puede valer la pena hacer un post sólo para castigar públicamente mi prejucio, en realidad quería aprovechar para mencionar otra cosa que recordé ese día. Gore termina la película (y su powerpoint) con la foto que saco el Voyager cuando se encontraba a unos 5920 millones de kilometros de Parque Chas, saliendo del sistema solar.
Esta foto fue sacada a sugerencia de Carl Sagan, y el mismo la nombro “A pale blue dot”. La foto, al final de la película, me recordó el speech que dio Sagan unos meses antes de morir, en el 96, al respecto, y que es lo que quería compartir con ustedes.
“ Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
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 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 this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, 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.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. 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 with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”
