Happy Darwin Day!!

Take a look.  (Click photo and zoom in for best results.)  This is life.  On the giant wheel of living things, we respresent one tiny ordinary spoke.  Then realize that this wheel represents the square root of the estimated number of species on Earth - that is, of the 9 million species estimated to exist, you are looking at 3,000, or less than one-fifth of one percent.  For millennia, humans were thought to be the pinnacle of creation, to rule and dominate over all other organisms, but how can that be?  We are so vastly outnumbered in ecosystems packed to the gills with organisms unaware and indifferent to our existence.  We are entirely dependent on them, but they would still fourish without us - most of them have for millions or hundreds of millions of years.  And we are new - remember that diagram that placed the history of Earth on the timescale of a calendar year and showed humans arriving after 11:59pm on December 31?  To them, we are simply the dominant species of the day.  And yet we do dominate, but in a very unique way - with our brains.  We have consciousness, an acute awareness of our existence, where we have been, where we are going.  We are specially equipped and advanced to explore and experience as much of our universe as possible all as a means to secure an equal or improved life for our offspring.  In other words, we have new and extraordinary means to perform an ancient and ordinary task, a task we share with nine million fellow survivors and relatives.  Today we recognize the birth of a man who produced possibly the most important idea of all time.  Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection continues to send shockwaves around the world and forces humankind to reconsider its place among life.

"A living creature is always in the business of surviving in its own environment.  It is never unfinished - or in another sense, it is always unfinished.  So, presumably, are we."

                                                                                         - Richard Dawkins -  The Ancestor's Tale

Perspective

The Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of Earth taken  in 1990 by the Voyager I spacecraft from ~3.7 billion miles away.   At the request of Carl Sagan, NASA commanded the Voyager 1 spacecraft, having completed its primary mission and now approaching the edge of the Solar System, to turn its camera around and to take a photograph of Earth across a great expanse of space.

The photograph triggered deep introspection and reflection in Sagan, and subsequently, he used the title of the photograph as the primary title of his 1994 book, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space. 

I don't have much to say about it - just wanted to share it as it isn't very well-known among the general public but absolutely should be.  On its surface, the picture is dull and lacks the panache of other famous photographs.  But the implications and the thoughts it provokes are on the grandest of scales.  Dr Sagan understood that and expressed it better than anyone:

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 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.

 

Anywho - As my color scheme indicates, my 2011 Stanley Cup prediction goes to the Vancouver Canucks (over Boston in 6). As much as I hate - HATE- picking the team with best record (it appears cliche, lazy, and is usually wrong), their play this year has been consistently head and shoulders above everyone else.  They are a well-oiled machine that could lose several steps between now and April and still be the team to beat.  Watch out for Pittsburgh or New York Rangers in the East and Los Angeles and Dallas in the West.