Life in optical

Today marks the 20th anniversary of the famous Pale Blue Dot picture. It was a collective revelation. The day we had to realise all of our egos fit into 3 pixels…

And to quote the words of 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.

Read more about the story of the Pale Blue Dot picture

And here is a talk in which Brian Cox tells us why the perspective the Pale Blue Dot gave us 20 years ago still matters today. Enjoy.

In this telephone interview of Nathi Mthethwa, South African minister of police, a BBC journalist is desperately fishing for bad news about South Africa’s security records for the upcoming football world cup after the death of the white supremacist Eugene Terreblanche. The minister’s replies are pragmatic and rational and well balanced and the journalist really appears to be fishing – and failing to get what he wants.

FYI, this is what the minister refers to: The 2009 season of the Indian cricket Premier league coincided with the general elections in India. Due to concerns regarding players’ security, the venue was shifted to South Africa.

I love her passion and her arguments are compelling.

I don’t like claims like “I hope that my accession to this high office gives confidence to women everywhere” (Irina Bokova, upon her accession to the post of DG of UNESCO). What a clumsy sentence. I don’t know if those are her words or those of the journalist editing the interview but such proclamations taste of self-justifying delusion with an aftertaste of inaction.

I am not questioning that we need role models, but being a role-model cannot be a self-assigned role. One is a role-model if there are actual people looking up to one and wanting to reach that place. And for that, we need action. One doesn’t become a role model by ambition, one becomes a role model by popular acclaim. We need the women in high positions not to be just looked at by others thinking ‘it’s possible’ – we need the women in high positions to engage other women so that when they are looked at the thinking goes ‘it could be me’.

I wish Irina Bokova the best but most of all, I hope she becomes a true instrument of change because she is in a position now to bring something to lots of other people’s best too.

PS: International Women’s day on March 8 every year is a good day to take a minute to think about women as a group, be aware of what they bring and try to engage them more, to think of what it means to be a woman, what we can achieve as a group of people sharing something, etc. – but that’s a whole other topic :)