Preconceptions can be funny.

Take climbers for example. Climbers usually self identify as progressive, open-minded people living unbounded lifestyles and adopting an untamed approach on life. Climbers are known for their active defiance both of authority and boundaries. Right?

Well not exactly. On closer look any outsider allowed to peer into the world of climbing will quickly notice how tribalistic the climbing community can be. How strongly resistant to change and how in constant need of saints and totems to worship. Climbers can be as obedient to their internal laws as they are defiant to the laws of outsiders. And climbers can be vicious in persecuting fellow climbers not abiding by such internal laws. If you thing about it ours is a deeply conservative and fundamentalist community.

Our perceived “progressiveness” is just one big erroneous preconception. And this is such a bittersweet irony that it ends up almost being funny. Seeing those who identify themselves as “progressive” becoming as bound by sacred truths as those whom they frown upon for being conservative.

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Similar preconceptions plague the concept of science when viewed from the perspective of the “alternative” crowds. Preconceptions related to its mission, its motives, its very essense. Science is misinterpreted as a corporate / authority tool. The systematic /epistemonic approach on reality is feared and condemned as an enemy of beauty. Logic is pitted against emotions as if the two cannot coexist. Science is viewed as solidified cynicism and as a foe of the sentiments.

I find sentiment and logic can coexist. As can beauty and truth. To the preconceptions of the “alternative crowd” I will always be answering with a pale blue dot.

If you look closely to the opening photo of the article you will see the pale blue dot suspended in a ray of light. This humble cyan pixel is an image of Earth taken from Voyager 1 space probe on 14 February 1990. The following text is a piece of factual poetry brought to the world by one of the greatest modern advocates of science. This is what a man of science felt upon eyeing our tiny home against the vastness of the Cosmos.

Among others, this is for you gate keepers of ethical righteousness, by someone whom you would swiftly brand as a priest of cold blood logic and a man without a soul. Let me know how you liked it.

Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

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.