Just some food for thought if you wish to read.
I do not own any images that are included in this jumble of thoughts, so credit goes where it is due, which I believe is to NASA.
It is often wondered whether humans have a purpose in this universe. Perhaps we do, perhaps we don't. But when we take a step back and look upon ourselves from billions of miles away, we realize that if we want there to be meaning in our lives, we have to make it. It won't be handed to us on a silver platter and it will never be that easy.
Some people spend their whole lives searching for this supposed "meaning of life." Is it truly 42, or is it something else? A symbol? Words? A sentence? We likely will never know, less we make giant super computers that could potentially calculate it. Otherwise, there is no meaning that we know of thus far.
The pale blue dot is so isolated in the vast indigo of space that we can easily come to the conclusion that we are alone. However, this is not necessarily true. Even when we are surrounded by hundreds of people here on Earth, we can still feel alone. So, could Earth possibly be surrounded by hundreds of other planets just like it, yet the perceived distance between them makes the human race still feel alone?
In the history of the human race, there has often been a pattern of the more powerful abusing said power in order to make themselves feel better. This can be extended beyond just the Europeans' colonization of the West- it goes into space. We are so focused on the legacy of the human race that space must be conquered and explored- we must find other intelligent species like ourselves to satisfy our loneliness. But this is before we've even begun to understand the deepest, darkest depths of our own oceans. Human ambition can be a good thing, but sometimes we're too ambitious- we get ahead of ourselves and try to understand something beyond a point we haven't learned about yet. And this pale blue dot, so far away and yet so close, is that faraway goal. It is what we want to achieve, but there are many steps between here and there that we should closely examine first before the resolution.
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We think grand, and yet cannot see the bigger picture. It is something that seems to plague our society, deep to its core. Large projects that we create only to satisfy our own ambition ignores the repercussions that those creations may have on the world and people around it. Humans want to build the tallest building possible, but that takes resources, time, energy, and people. And where do these resources come from? How are they obtained? What effects does that extraction process have on the environment?
This pale blue dot. It represents everything that we know, but it also represents everything that we don't know. It is where every human has lived and died, discovered and explored, yet it is what we hope to learn that we may never know.
The meaning of life is that pale blue dot. Or it may just be 42.
