Pale Blue Dot Redux

Back in the 1980s, Carl Sagan realized how important it would be for society to see what our home looks like from as far away as possible. For years he worked for years trying to convince NASA to use the Voyager 1 spacecraft to turn around before it left the solar system and take a photo of Earth.

It finally did, and the photo above is the result. The very small barely blue pixel is Earth as viewed from 6 billion kilometers away was the subject of a very moving speech/book by Carl Sagan, but we'll come back to that in a second.

In 2013 July something very unique also happened. A couple of forward thinking scientists on the Cassini space probe team had a very Sagan-like moment but with a twist. They realized that with the advent of technology it would be possible to broadcast to the world ahead of time that a certain space craft would be turning around and taking a photo of you. The Day the Earth Smiled was the result of that.

On July 19, 2013, this beautiful photograph of the same "pale blue dot" was taken while thousands of people looked up at the sky:

That tiny blue beautiful dot is us. Only Carl Sagan's thoughts can do justice to this pivotal image in human history. I can only imagine how much more he would have to say if he'd been here to witness it.

Click play below and listen.

"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." - Carl Sagan

Peace has been a difficult to acquire commodity for Earth, and violence seems to continue to endure almost anything thrown at it form across the globe. Perhaps this is what is needed; to step out of our scope of understanding and obliterate it with a perspective so powerful and staggering, to maybe one day eradicate such short sighted hatred. Maybe.

The Ruthless Red Giant

It may sound like a typical villain in an upcoming children's film this summer, but it's far from that. This is the ultimate fate of our Sun; the next stage in it's natural life cycle.

As the Sun ages it will use it will use up more and more of it's hydrogen core which will in turn increase it's size, luminosity and energy generated i.e the Sun will get hotter and larger. In fact in about 4.8 billion years the Sun will compare to its current size like this:

Yah that's a huge upgrade. And a huge problem for Earth. So big in fact that as I alluded to earlier...no life will survive.

But that's the ending of the story, how about the things that will happen along the way?

• [50,000 Years from Now] Niagara Falls will continue erode into Lake Erie will no longer bexist
• [50 Million Years From Now] Africa will be divided into two continents as Red Sea floods into the East African Rift
• [250 Million Years From Now] All the continents may fuse back together into a supercontinent
• [500-600 million Years From Now] Supercontinent breaks up 
• [1 Billion Years From Now] Surface Temperature reaches 47 degrees celcius. Most water has evaporated. Most multicellular life has died out (yes that's us)

The Earth is 4.5 billion years old. 1 Billion years from now it will no longer sustain life. Therefore...the Earth has already been around more than 80% of it's expected life.

The earth post-destruction by the Sun

Takeaways

It's truly amazing that something that gave us life (The Sun) will also likely take it away from us. The Human Species has a very likely end date. Depending on what scale you look at things, things won't really stay the same...

Or..things will stay the same. 

Consider this, Humans (Homo Sapien) on Earth have only been around for about 400,000 - 250,000 years ago. That's not even a million years. The Earth has been around for 4.5 billion years. 

We've only been around for 0.003 % of Earth's existence. Therefore to us things really do stay the same.

Like I've said all along...it's all about Scale.

Scale

Back in the 1990s, movies could be pretty hit and miss. Some (including myself) would even say that genres like sci-fi, fantasy and superhero have "grown up" in the current era. But that doesn't mean that they didn't have their moments of pure genius. Men In Black was a both a box office hit and a critical success. But for me the most memorable moment was this:

Wow. How novel an idea is that? Our entire universe...could actually be just a marble in the hands of some random alien. What this scene really did for me was help me realize how important and exciting the concept of scale was. 

The difference in size between a very tiny object (atom) and a very large one (the sun) is mind boggling. But what was even more interesting was something I like to call "Infinite Scale". This is the idea that as science advances we will find smaller and smaller objects (neutrino) and on the other end of the spectrum, larger and larger ones (Sloan Great Wall). 

But hey, why listen to me drone on about it when instead you could play around with an awesome flash animation made by a couple of apparently genius teenagers:

Wicked-Awesome? Thought so. But there's an even better example of scale much closer to home:

It would take 1.3 million earths to fill 1 sun (source)

Now that..admittedly...is a little terrifying, and really puts a perspective on how far we are from the sun to be able to see it as a friendly, yellow floating smiley face (instead of that very ominous monster above).

To top off my discussion about scale I will leave you with this. Scientists now tell us that the largest scale possible is the "End of Greatness" , where the universe looks the same in all directions, and there is no longer any sense of being able to tell one part from another. You've basically zoomed out so far that it all looks like one big homogeneous structure....

Kinda looks like a marble wouldn't you say? 

What is the Milky Way?

What is the Milk way?*

To some it's an excellent chocolate bar that tastes a lot like a Mars Bar and/or 3 Musketeers...

To others, it's usually a strip of sparkling stars in the night sky:

And then finally to some others it's the iconic spiraling image of the milky way galaxy:

But what I'm asking is not simply what is the Milky Way? *But rather what and where is the milky way in the context of us? The short answer is..well we're in it.

A few years back, more recently than I'd like to admit, I asked myself a simple question - how can we see the Milky Way when we're supposed to be in it, and if we're in it why does it look nothing like the iconic images of the galaxy we've all seen?

After a little bit of research I suddenly had this profound moment of clarity - I was able to imagine exactly where we were and how/why we saw what we did when we looked up at the night sky.

Turns out, since we're inside the Milky Way, and are looking in, and what we are able to see from earth is the very bright and dense center of the galaxy but not the whole thing. It's like driving to downtown Toronto and only seeing part of the skyline but not all of it... Needless to say, the meaning of the word "scale" took on a whole new level of meaning for me. 

The Milky Way galaxy as we see it from earth is our first major "landmark" in our local area of the Universe. If we were to give someone directions on how to find us it would be sort of like this:

How awe-inspiring is that? 

Enough to make you wonder whether it's worth trying to win every argument, always make your point and do anything to get your way.
Enough to make you realize that there really aren't a lot of us and we're lonely as hell stuck out in one of the Milky Way's outer spiral arms.

In fact, it's enough to warrant a Morgan Freeman narrated "zoom out". And that is the video I will leave you with tonight along with a fun inequality to ponder...

Us < Earth < Solar System < Local Interstellar Cloud < Orion–Cygnus Arm < Milky Way....