The Frosty Atheist

By Ross Meisner

I’m torn between desperately wanting to change the world, and happily hiding in my corner as the world passes by. As a Pisces (atheists all believe in astrology, right?) this has always been my character: like two fish swimming in opposite directions, I see the benefit of both going out and staying in. Standing up and staying seated. The big picture and the tiniest detail. In other words, forever second-guessing my choices and direction. (Yes, I can comfort myself by saying the best life contains both elements, but that’s rationalization for another day.)

As a manifestation of the first urge — to help change the world in some small way — I humbly offer this new column, intended to be a regular installment of atheistic musings. If this column ends abruptly, kindly recognize it as a manifestation of the second urge. (Insert smiley face here.)

My goal for The Frosty Atheist is simple: to inspire. I hope to provide a small reminder of the wonders of life, the universe, and scientific thinking that dwarf any metaphysical belief system I know, and share my awe of the natural world, which can energize us more than any religious sermon ever has.

It’s an easy lay-up, but I can think of no better way to kick off this column than to reference Carl Sagan’s profound reflections on the Voyager 1 snapshot of the Earth, famously known as “The Pale Blue Dot,” taken in 1990 from well beyond Neptune’s orbit, 5.5 light-hours away. NASA was reluctant to try take the picture because looking back towards Earth from such a distance meant looking nearly at the Sun, which would blind the camera, but Carl was persuasive about the human impact such a picture would have. Earth’s tiny bit of reflected sunshine was at the very limit of the camera’s ability to detect, less than a full pixel’s width.

Carl Sagan’s brief reflection in his 1994 book The Pale Blue Dot captures the essence of what it is to be a sentient being living on a dust mote in an unremarkable corner of the infinite universe. It is awe-inspiring, mind-blowing, and incredibly humbling.

Reflections on a Pale Blue Dot, by Carl Sagan

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider again 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.

And now Voyager 1 is 23 light-hours away — an unimaginable distance for humans, yet barely dipping a toe in the vast cosmic ocean.