Semalam aku menonton kuliah dari Carl Sagan yang menceritakan secara singkat isi dari bukunya yang berjudul ‘Blue Pale Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space’ yang diterbitkan pada taon 1994 dan dipilih sebagai salah satu buku terbaek oleh The New York Times pada taon 1995. Walaupun aku sendiri punya buku ini dalam bentuk digital nya, namun buku setebal 193 halaman itu sendiri tak pernah aku baca sampai selesai. Yah mungkin suatu hari nanti.
Buku itu sendiri dibuat berdasarkan foto dari Planet Bumi yang diambil pada taon 1990 oleh Voyager 1 dari jarak 6 juta kilometer dari Bumi. Dalam foto tersebut, Bumi terlihat sebagai sebuah titik biru keputihan kecil di kegelapan antariksa.
Setelah Voyager 1 menyelesaikan misinya, NASA mengarahkan Voyager 1 untuk meninggalkan Solar System atas permintaan dari Carl Sagan dan memutar kameranya ke arah Bumi dan menghasilkan gambar yang dikenal dengan nama ‘Blue Pale Dot’ tersebut. Foto itu juga merupakan gambar di sampul buku dari Carl Sagan itu.
Carl Edward Sagan yang meninggal di akhir Desember 1996 pada usianya yang ke 62 adalah seorang astronom dari Amerika Serikat dan dikenal sebagai orang yang gigih mempopulerkan ilmu pengetauan terutama dalam bidang Astrofisika dan Astronomi.
Dia dikenal sebagai ilmuwan yang mempelopori ilmu eksobiologi dan penggagas usaha pencarian makhluk cerdas dari luar angkasa (Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence/SETI).
Pada tanggal 11 Mei 1996, setengah taon sebelon dia meninggal, dia melukiskan refleksi yang yang sangat terkenal dalam kuliahnya yang aku tonton semalam. Isinya aku copy paste kan kemari:
From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again 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.
