The Magnificence of Small Blue Dots

It’s a strange paradox that an idea, without changing either meaning or context, can produce wildly different results in the mind of the one considering it.

Take, for instance, the unthinkable reality of the universe. 

According to NASA, in our galaxy, The Milky Way, there are more than 100 billion stars. 

Think about that for a minute. 

In the present day of constant information, we throw around numbers like “billion” as if they were real points of measure in our everyday lives. But imagine a million anything. Million. With an ‘M’. 

One million sheets of notebook paper, for example, laying flat on top of each other, would create a stack reaching nearly 330 feet high. 

But a stack of 100 billion sheets of that same paper would be 33 million feet high: A pile that would stretch to an altitude of more than 6000 miles. To put that in some perspective, there is no point on Earth where you are any farther than 62 miles from what scientists consider to be “outer space”.

And yet 100 billion is how many stars - our own sun being but one - are in our galactic neighborhood. In our lone, single galaxy. That thought, taken alone, is nearly unfathomable. 

And yet something so impossibly large as our galaxy, a collection of suns and planets so colossal in scope that even pared-down comparisons cannot bring it into the full grasp of the human mind, is actually barely worth a mention when set against the expanse of the cosmos:  

In the observable universe, there are at least 100 billion galaxies.

Earth is a grain of sand in the ocean. Not even remotely large enough to be a period at the end of one sentence, in one paragraph, in one chapter of all of the recorded words that have ever been written.

Nothing has quite brought this reality into focus for mankind like a photograph taken in February of 1990. On the 14th day of that month, the Voyager 1 space probe collected an image facing back toward Earth, from a distance of around 3.7 billion miles. Earth appears as a single pixel in the picture, a “Pale Blue Dot”, invisible to any but the most trained scientific eye.

The astronomer Carl Sagan, in his 1994 book, was the first to use the term Pale Blue Dot, using the phrase as the title. Reflecting on Voyager’s photograph, and what it represented to the millions of people on earth who had now seen it, Sagan summarized the collective feeling like this:

"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. … There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world.”

The sheer weight of the realization that our existence - our impact in the greater scope of things - isn’t relevant, is not always a particularly comfortable one to consider.

Does it somehow lessen the very real pain and concern and effort we face here and now? We may very well exist on what amounts to a rotating speck of rock and gas…but to those who have lost health or income or courage or hope, contemplating our apparent insignificance isn’t of great assistance in navigating the events of the day.

But it could be. It depends on how our minds consider it. 

It of course brings stark clarity to the fact that we are small, and God is not. But here is where the same truth brings different messages, depending on the listener:  Considering our true place on the arc of the time-space continuum, the proud - even the least-proud among us - are humbled. But the weak and the tired and the downtrodden gain strength. 

If we consider that the grand, incalculable swath of stars in the night sky is but a breath - here and then forgotten - amongst a thousand hurricanes, then casting our microscopic fears into the arms of the one who created it begins to seem somehow like the only logical thing to do.

And it puts into focus the fact that our troubles, big or small through our eyes, are all but dust particles in a desert. None is different than another, when the lens moves far enough away. And the same is true for our relative importance, apart from each other, and apart from God. We’re all the same. The “importance” of the most powerful leader and the blind beggar in the street is marked to the onlooker by counting coins and titles and automobiles. And nothing else. 

We need not feel that familiar old demon of self-criticism when we’ve made mountains out of pebbles. Because all we have here are pebbles, and we’ve made mountains of them all.

We’ve done it when we’ve selfishly wanted more while surrounded by abundance. When we’ve failed to use our abundance to fill the cup of another.  When we’ve lost our cool about the tiniest of nonsensical slights. When we’ve failed to take the leap because of the imagined perils. 

When we’ve once again failed to keep things in perspective. Because at the end of the day, we don’t truly have perspective. We just think we do. 

If we truly had perspective - truly realized the futility of our own individual failures and triumphs -  we’d know that gaining great power or tremendous wealth in this tiny world, when done for its own sake, is a goal so absurdly meaningless as to be pathetic. A pursuit which seems so important, so fraught with gravity, is in reality no more or less valuable, by comparison, than walking to the store, paying the light bill, or complaining about the loud exhaust on the neighbor’s car.

We’ve all heard the platitudes about not sweating the small things. But I think that’s backwards. Or at least we need to change our understanding of “small”. Everything we’ve ever known in this life, everything we ever will know, is “small”.

Our job, then, is to recognize that truth. We can stop the hilarious, relentless effort of trying to find a Volkswagen in a shoe box, but instead endeavor to quiet ourselves, and find the meaning in what’s at hand.

God, in his infinite nature, is greater than the universe, both known and unknown. And yet here we are, small and seemingly alone, alive, because He willed it so. 

Which means that whether, in our small nature, in our small minds we determine a thing to be small, is of no concern to Him. And conversely, the cosmos, vast and unknowable to us, is of no more importance to Him than the smallest of our thoughts about our small lives, in our small cities, on this tiny Pale Blue Dot.

Which leads one to believe that perhaps we should follow the model. Perhaps we aren’t valuing the small stuff enough. Perhaps we need more to acknowledge ourselves as the small, empty husks we are, and stop trying to be bigger. More important. To be somebody.

Our real value is in our emptiness. Hollow vessels, that somehow can carry innumerable blessings from a God who holds a hundred billion galaxies in his hand. 

Vessels that here, on the Pale Blue Dot, a single pixel in the frame, can be filled and emptied and refilled again, if we pay attention to the smallness.

That Wendell Berry was a writer and thinker has been on the fringes of my consciousness for many years. But I had never read a single word from his pen until my friend Nathan Crews showed up at my door with one of his books a few years ago. Since then, I’ve grown to consider Berry one of the greatest writers of this or any age.

His books, both fiction and non, are full of depth and insight. But it is one poem in particular to which I turn time and again, when I feel myself laboring to be something larger than I am.

The poem is called The Peace of Wild Things:

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

God, creator of the vast and the unspeakably distant, has also given us magnificence in the slight and in the familiar.

And He has valued both equally.

Maybe it’s time I do the same.