Hurtling Through Space

It’s a fantastic book, and I’m loving going through it. Remembering that Sagan was an exobiologist gives it some of the feel of The Selfish Gene, too, mixing astronomy with cosmology, philosophy, humanism, compassion, and biology. I was fortunate to pick up a near-new hardback copy of Cosmos from Amazon Marketplace for only a few pounds — worth every penny.

I suppose the egotism thing depends on how you look at it. The believer believes there is a higher power as a baseline, so anyone denying that “must” assume that humans are the highest form of life (false dichotomy, etc) and is surely egotistical. The non-believer sees no evidence for a higher power, is normally intelligent enough to realise that Homo sapiens aren’t the highest form of life (merely one that is reasonably well adapted to this present environment), and tends to consider that everything is “bigger than us” — as we’re merely destructive, parasitic microbes on the face of a large rock hurtling through space (see what I did there?) on an unimportant end of a galactic spiral arm, lost amongst the giganticness of the universe/multiverse.

Perspective differences are interesting, no? As Sagan said of Earth in his pale blue dot speech, given a few months before he died in 1996:

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.

If that’s not the absence of egotism, I don’t know what is.