Fifteen years ago I read Carl Sagan’s beautiful book Pale
Blue Dot which describes how unique and interesting we are in our own solar
system, but at the same time presents the idea of how fragile our isolated
little world really is. We’re not the center of the solar system, let alone the
entire universe (or--to put it with more of a religious bent-- all of
creation), and therefore need to advance space exploration in hopes of
increasing our survivability as a species. Sagan has a now famous
monologue from that book where he explains just how miniscule we all are
when looking back at our planet from four billion miles, as the spacecraft
Voyager 2 did when she snapped a now iconic image that became
the title of Sagan’s book. The picture of earth, “suspended in a sunbeam,” is
certainly a humbling one, and provides an interesting perspective on all of our
daily activities and ambitions.The problem is that that picture, taken billions of miles out, is not our perspective.
Our world is quickly buying into the idea that massive data
sets of information can surely solve our problems if analyzed correctly. Big
data is trying desperately to equate our lives to statistical analysis and our
behavioral patterns to mathematical formula. It seems there’s an omnipresent
push to ensure that every aspect of our lives is empirical and reduced to
measurable observation. However, this perspective on life is exactly the
shortsightedness that Sagan brought to the table with his book. Please don’t
misunderstand me—the macroscopic perspective certainly has value; there is
value to remembering once in awhile that our lives are actually a microcosm on
a speck of dust suspended in a sunbeam. However, that’s not the perspective of
our day-to-day lives.
We live on the human scale. The human scale includes in its
fringes our understanding of the cosmos; however, like our place in the solar
system, this cosmic perspective is not at the center. It can’t be. Our world is
a world of personal relationships which exist very much within the human
perspective, so much so that it in fact defines the human perspective as
exactly that which sees and understands existence through the relationships
that we work so hard at building, maintaining, or sometimes ending.
The world of big data and a cosmological view of our lives
are both incredibly extreme perspectives of our reality. When we wake up
everyday, it’s not with thoughts of the
asteroid that recently came between the earth and the moon, nor is it with
thoughts of crunching numbers to determine an algorithm for
dressing ourselves, but rather with thoughts of navigating through the web of
human relationships that we’ve created, and with the hope that our navigational
senses will make those webs stronger. Questions of family, friends, and work
are almost always questions firmly in the fields of the humanities. If there’s
an issue with a presentation you have to make at work, it’s more than likely
because you’re trying to impress or persuade someone. If there’s an issue with
a family member, you’re trying to figure out the best course of action to
repair that relationship. If there’s an issue with a friend, you may find
yourself thinking on the best advice to give. The close approach of that
asteroid—though startling—fades from our constructed reality pretty quickly.
For us, the human concerns are those concerns that make up what is real—our
constructed reality.
This is the reality that we live in, and the human
perspective is therefore the view that we need to keep in mind most often.
