Forgotten Corner of YouTube
In the Summer of 2007, my wife, Pam, and I created a video called, "Forgotten
Corner of the Universe."
In September, we posted an expanded version of the script as an essay on this site.
Last week, Pam put the old video on YouTube. As she was putting it up, it
occurred to her that it might get more views if she put the name "Carl Sagan" in the
title. She was right.
My only other YouTube video, "Respect,"
has been up since March 30th. It reached 300 views on Friday, May 23rd — 300 in
just under two months — not exactly a hit. The new video's not a hit either, but with
300 views in five days, there was a marked difference. The numbers rose more
quickly because of Carl Sagan's name. "Respect," which was hardly being seen
anymore, rode "Forgotten Corner's" coattails to its best week since the first.
Science-Fatwa But just because the Carl Sagan fans watched it, didn't mean they liked it. One
fellow seemed particularly perturbed. He (or perhaps the society he either heads or
envisions) called a "Science-Fatwa on this Gilbreath guy."
A fatwa. I've never had anyone call a fatwa against me before. It specifically calls
for "Low ratings, comments and reply videos." As of this writing, there are no reply
videos, only eight comments, and eight ratings giving the video 2½ stars out of five.
So, as fatwas go, this one hasn't been too bad.
But, along with the other comments, it was enough to provoke my interest. I took a
tour of Carl Sagan videos on YouTube. Many of the videos were creative and
moving. But there was something bizarre about others. I've seen the atheistic side of
atheism, but here was the religious side. Some of the videos treated Sagan's words
like sacred text. The people commenting often did so with religious fervor. One
person said Sagan's famous passage from Pale Blue Dot (more later) should be
"recited in school instead of singing our patriotic songs." Another said, "We're
recruiting for the Church Of Sagan. Blessed be the man who wears the turtleneck
sweater and corduroy jacket."
As much as many of them showed love for Carl, they showed disdain for the
followers of God. "Religious folks are cockroaches." "Religion is so outdated and
nonsensical." "How can Moses' stupid burning bush compare to these discoveries?"
I began to think of other videos I've seen on the internet — clips of famous atheists
making witty remarks to college audiences, and of a debate between a prominent
member of the new wave of atheists and a Jewish rabbi. At one point, the rabbi
pointed out what a cold, sad world it would be without God. The atheist retorted
something along the lines of, "It's the truth that matters, not how it makes you feel."
I began to think about that in light of all the things said until then. It was the atheist,
not the rabbi, who had been continually appealing to emotion as opposed to reason.
He's the one who had been playing to the crowd, and the crowd had been loving
it — yelling, rejoicing, roaring as if they were watching their team win a football
game in a blowout. They sadly reminded me of the simple young man in Proverbs 7,
following his seducer "as an ox goeth to the slaughter . . . knowing not that it is for
his life."
They seemed full of ecstasy at being confined to lives without meaning. There is a
certain freedom in nothingness, but if you're not really nothing, it turns out to be
what Burt Lancaster's character in "Birdman of Alcatraz" called, "the illusion of
freedom."
Pale Blue Dot
In 1990, when the Voyager I spacecraft had done those things for which it was
primarily created and was on its way out of our solar system, NASA scientists aimed
it back in our direction and took a picture of earth from that distant vantage point.
By then, so many movies, books, television shows, and sermons had called the earth
"a speck of dust," it had become a cliche. With Voyager's photograph, it ceased to
be a cliche in our minds and became real.
Here's what Carl Sagan wrote:
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 teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme
leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there. . . . 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. . . . 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.
Carl Sagan was a man of many talents, but perhaps at his best, he was a teacher.
Here he's teaching us to have a cosmic perspective. He was much concerned about
humanity's ability to survive this present age and he hoped that by showing how
small we are, he could show us the relative insignificance of the sources of our
quarrels, thus discouraging the use of war.
Stepping back and getting the big picture is almost always good advice. Encouraging
humans to solve their problems peacefully is a good thing.
The problem is with Sagan's underlying assumption that physical size is the ultimate
measure of worth. He seems to be saying economic doctrine can't be important
because we live on a pale blue dot. As he lays out the story, teachers of morals seem
quaint and a little silly considering the earth's smallness. How can a religion be
confident in the light of the fact that humans are tiny?
"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."
Isn't it interesting how wording influences our feelings? If we hear "imagined self-
importance," we recoil, thinking of stuffy people who take everything, especially
themselves, too seriously. But if we hear that love is meaningful or that family is
good, most of us say, "Of course." The "self" he's referring to in "self-importance"
is our collective importance. He's talking about the importance of people and says
it's only imagined.
How does he know our importance is only imagined? Because when your space
ship is far enough away, earth looks like a dot.
In the video, I said Sagan chose words designed to make us "feel small." One person
commented, "We ARE small, and yes, our planet IS insignificant when you are able
to understand the vastness of our universe."
We are small and we are large. What does either one have to do with significance or
worth? Size words like large and small only have meaning relative to other things. Here is a
person convinced "the vastness of our universe" proves "our planet IS
insignificant." I wonder what significant means in such thinking. Big?
Significant to Whom?
In the Cosmos quote used in the video, Sagan says, "If we long for our planet to be
important, there is something we can do about it." That's an amazing statement —
truly a mystical leap. If earth's not already important, what could we possibly do
that could change things?
His answer is even more amazing. "We make our world significant by the courage
of our questions and by the depth of our answers."
To whom are we making it significant? It's already significant to human beings. We
live here! Who out there is going to be impressed with the courage of our questions?
God? Sagan was an agnostic.
I believe he emphasized our smallness because he saw that concept as an antidote to
theistic faith, especially Christianity, which he saw as dangerous.
Imagine He worked to diminish us in our eyes for an especially noble cause — peace. In
many ways, Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot is reminiscent of John Lennon's "Imagine."
Imagine there's no Heaven . . . No hell . . . No countries . . . Nothing to kill or die for.
And no religion too.
So imagine . . . imagine nothing to die for. Imagine a world where nothing is of
enough value for you to lay down your life for it. Imagine children not important
enough to fight for, should it come to that. Imagine a cold existence, where your
ultimate value is set by the society you live in, and by whatever feelings of worth
you are able to muster up within yourself.
It's easy if you try. But it's not pretty.
Posted: 5-30-2008
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