We’re made of star stuff

 I was in high school when Carl Sagan’s 13 part television series, Cosmos, was aired on Doordarshan. I had always loved science, but by the end of the first episode, I was in love with Science. And with Carl Sagan too. That was the only show I watched on TV, and when the power went out on Sunday morning, I almost abandoned my atheism to pray that the power be restored before the serial started. (That the power came back on, without me having to resort to prayer only strengthened my belief that I could manage fine without religion!)

Everything about the series was incredible to the teenage me. The themes it dealt with, the footage shot on site, the special effects that showed Sagan walking though different environments, the music, and most of all the presenter. With his mix of intelligence, compassion and good looks, he was certainly my dream come true.

It was after watching how Eratosthenes calculate the circumference of the Earth that the concept of time-zones and the significance of the International Date Line started making sense to me. The whole idea of hopping across the Date Line and going from tomorrow to yesterday was fascinating for me, and for a few days, I harboured the idea that I had discovered time travel. Discussing that with my grandfather, I told him that if I kept traveling round the world from East to West, I would add days to my life. To which my pragmatic grandfather replied, “instead of adding days to your life, try making the days you have count. That would be more useful.”

Though the television series was telecast only once, the book based on it came out soon after, and that could be read and re-read till I had committed almost all of it to memory. Almost every book of popular science I read subsequently, from Bronowski’s ‘Ascent of Man’ to Hawking’s ‘A Brief History of Time’ built on the foundation that Cosmos laid.

It was Carl Sagan who, in the last episode of Cosmos, introduced me to thoughts of the nuclear war, of the position of women in science, and left me with the lingering question, “who speaks for Earth?”. The powerful mix of science, wisdom and compassion is what characterized the serial and all the other books authored by him.

These were themes he would constantly return to. His description of the R-Complex of the brain as being the site for tribalism, aggression and other reptilian behavior still helps me make sense (and forgive) of the behavior of certain people and societies.

A Glimpse of Eternity

But more than anything else, I will be grateful to Carl Sagan for showing me the window thought which I can look out anytime and catch a glimpse of Infinity. It is because of him that I can revel in my sheer Insignificance in comparison to the grandeur of Space and Time. And at the same time experience the high of knowing that as an intrinsic part of the Universe, I too am just as magnificent. Why would anyone need religion when one can experience the same intensity of emotion at the foot of Science? When you know that you are made of star stuff, you don’t really need a God.

In the vastness of Space and the immensity of Time, I am glad I met Carl Sagan when I did.

Happy Birthday, Carl Sagan.

“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 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. 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.

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.”

Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot