One of my favourite pieces of media is Carl Sagan's famous monologue about "the Pale Blue Dot" (PBD) photograph. It's wonderful in text, but is especially good in Sagan's voice, and presented alongside the photo:

I love the PBD image and text, and while I won't belabour its merits here, I've written about them extensively elsewhere. In this note I want instead to discuss two glaring issues in the text, and whether and how those issues can be addressed.

The first issue is nihilism. Sagan very nearly straight up says we human beings don't much matter. We are tiny and inconsequential. All those generals and emperors – how silly they were to fight over a fraction of a dot. He's diminishing what can be won through violence, as a way of saying people shouldn't try to win through violence. We like the conclusion, and so it's tempting to accept that line of argument. But if we take it seriously, it means little we do matters. After all, if it's silly to want to be momentary master of a fraction of a dot, how much more silly to worry about whether you have a job, or your partner's happiness, or your child's schooling, or how to cook roast beef, or much of anything else.

Of course, the mere fact I don't like the nihilistic conclusion doesn't mean it's wrong. Maybe nihilism is correct! Maybe it's true that nothing we do much matters. But, at the very least, I think this implied conclusion makes it worth considering whether there are other issues in the text.

The second issue is an internal inconsistency: having strongly implied that life doesn't much matter, Sagan finishes with: "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."

This makes very little sense. Sagan effectively says both "hey, we're tiny and insignificant, so it doesn't make sense to aim at power and glory" and also uses this to say we need to be kinder to one another. He's trying to have it both ways. If winning glory doesn't matter, because it's on a very small scale, then loving each other doesn't much matter, either. Which is it?

People who love the Pale Blue Dot often don't much like this observation. They want to let Sagan off the hook. And of course you can do that if you creatively reinterpret his meaning, or engage in special pleading. But as beautiful as the Pale Blue Dot is – and I think it's magnificent – it's got some basic things wrong with it.

So, what to do? Part of me is tempted to throw my hands up in the air, say "Sagan got it wrong", and stomp off. But I think Sagan got a lot right, and it's astonishingingly insightful. It's pointing at something deep and true, and Sagan gets close to articulating it. Rather than letting him off the hook or stomping off we should instead ask: what can we save? And what's it pointing at?

Ultimately, I think the right approach is pretty obvious: to understand as deeply as possible that on the scale of the cosmos we are truly tiny creatures; and yet still retain confidence in the deep meaning in our actions. Those actions matter, both our crimes and our kindnesses. it's a mistake to think power and war don't matter. Those generals and emperors aren't wrong because they're operating in a small arena. They're wrong when they grossly violate other human beings, and it's because human beings really matter. They are in fact operating in a very important arena, the arena of human experience. The scriptures of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all have it right when they express variations on: "whoever destroys a life destroys an entire world; whoever saves a life saves an entire world".

Let's do a detailed critique of the PBD text. I realize it's presumptuous, but I want to identify what I feel is correct in it. The opening is superb. It really does relate our everyday experience – our individual lives, the totality of the 8 billion people alive today, the 110 billion who have ever lived – to that tiny point of pale light:

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest.

But for us, it's different. 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.

I'm a little suspicious of the next paragraph. But upon reflection the words are largely correct. I will register two mild critiques. First, there is already some insinuation – later made more explicit – that the triumphs of generals and emperors don't matter. But, in fact, they do¹. As I said above, if they don't, then nothing we do matters. Second, and this is an aside more than a strong critique, it's incongruous to be talking about "one corner of this pixel", when what's being discussed is a very-nearly-spherical object. Still, the paragraph is overall very good.

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.

The next paragraph has many problems:

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.

It's connected to the later comment on "the folly of human conceits". The implication is that human beings aren't important. But we are important. You can both understand that we live on a "lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark" and believe that human lives matter a tremendous amount. Now, there may be more and less healthy positions to take on this issue – plenty of people have little conception of enough, and elevated need for importance, and that's responsible for a lot of violence and pursuit of glory. But it's a terrible mistake to dismiss our importance. We can choose to believe in our own meaning.

The last sentence of the paragraph is fine – it's a bridge into the next paragraph, which is a beautiful reminder that humanity is a stewardship, somewhat apart from the rest of the text:

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.

The final paragraph is again troubling:

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.

The first sentence is arguably true, but it's a little too much astronomy agitprop for my taste (sorry Carl!). The second sentence is false. In fact, the folly of human conceits is better illustrated by many much more immediate and concrete errors. And nothing in the text underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another. What's the argument? Because we're tiny? Do ants have to deal kindly with one another because they're small? What about amoeba? There's no argument here, just a cleverly constructed vibe. The conclusion might well be true – I certainly believe it – but this argument doesn't show it. Indeed, there is no argument.

If you restructure the text around the correct elements, you end up with:

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest.

But for us, it's different. 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 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. To me, it underscores our responsibility to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

While there's still various minor issues, this is largely correct. I still find it beautiful and stirring, but must admit: it's much less stirring. It's no longer as full of human meaning, no longer condemning the silliness of our fighting, or exhorting us to kindness. The standard version appears to offer cosmic justifications for those conclusions. Unfortunately, those cosmic justifications were verbal sleight-of-hand. And when stripped them out, we're left with something with much less apparent meaning.

In the full PBD text, there's a striking parallel to the Abrahamic religious texts. One implied argument in the religious texts is "God created you and the Universe, so when He says you should behave like such-and-such, you should really pay attention". It's an argument from cosmology to individual action, and in this sense is similar to the PBD text. And both suffer when you realize that they're based on a false premise. The Abrahamic ones because their cosmology is wrong, undermining God's authority to determine human behaviour. And the PBD text because the argument from cosmos to human meaning is largely illusory.

Can we recover the beautiful connection the PBD attempts, between cosmos and individual meaning? I think we likely can. I won't attempt it in detail here. But I believe the key is to juxtapose and synthesize this kind of big-picture cosmic view with other points of view that arise out of the same underlying reality. The Pale Blue Dot and the tree of life and the 100 trillion connections in our brain and the many wondrous varieties of human experience and human possibility. All these things express a single underlying unity, a unity that ultimately we can aspire to apprehend, a deep communion with the universe, and also a deepening of self and of humanity. Hume is right that ought doesn't entirely arise out of is, but it's certainly made far, far deeper by a rich appreciation of the is.

I won't attempt to carry this program out here. I'm merely naming what I believe is a better goal and strategy than the PDB text, without actually doing the hard work to implement it! I do want to note a few challenges in such an endeavour. In historian Edwin Burtt's book "The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science"² Burtt makes a case that modern science caused a massive transition from a human-and-God-centered conception of reality, to a cosmos-centered reality, where humans are peripheral. This transition (together with economic specialization) has produced great alienation in the human condition. This kind of alienation is expressed through remarks like those of physicist Steve Weinberg that "the more the universe seem comprehensible the more it also seems pointless"³.

What Sagan was reaching for, and nearly grasped, was a way of connecting the cosmic to the human, scale to meaning. But that connection isn't to be found merely in size. It's found in structure, in relationship, in pattern and depth. A healthier view is a kind of long zoom: moving from the intricate interior of our lives outward to the vastness of the cosmos, linking the complexity within us to the complexity beyond. That means understanding our 3 billion base pairs, our 100 trillion synapses, and all the variety and possibility of human experience; and connecting that to the layered structures of culture, biosphere, and cosmos. Meaning lives in these layers, and in the ways they interconnect. Yes, you want deep communion with the unself; but it must be grounded in loving your family, your friends, your place and time. You're a pan-African plains ape – and also an artist, a scientist, a poet, and an explorer. You can apprehend the cosmos-in-the-small and the cosmos-in-the-large, in all these capacities.

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