There are only a few things that excite my beloved husband, and space is definitely one of them. He has more knowledge of space, Mars, and NASA in his pinky toe than I will ever have in my entire enormous brain. I'm so happy that he has found this thing that he loves and I have been thinking for a while that I want to try and get him a telescope. Until then, we settled for the "Star Party" at Bogus Basin last night. After an insane and seemingly endless drive up Bogus Basin Road (I didn't believe you Wes. It was awful. I will never doubt you again.) at ten o'clock last night we finally pulled into a pitch-black parking lot full of cars. There were about a dozen different high powered telescopes set up and you could stand in line to look at planets and stars. Now I'm not at all interested in this stuff, and it was dark as hell, and the drive took about every ounce of patience I had, but it was incredible. We only looked through two telescopes, both of which were pointed at Saturn. I'm not ashamed to tell you all that it was one of the most breathtaking things I've ever seen. It was humbling and makes you feel insignificant in a completely happy way.
It reminded me of an excerpt from a lecture given by the astronomer Carl Sagan, talking about a picture of Earth taken from space. It's long, but for me anyway, it helps during those times I'm feeling extra self-involved or sorry for myself.
"We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every 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 in 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 the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. 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. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, 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 and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."
