The Pale Blue Dot - get some prospective!

"Let’s be clear, we are all in this together"

This week Trump played the race-card as he seeks to deflect attention away from his failure to act promptly over Covid-19. He’s stirring dark waters of xenophobia and blind prejudice in a scramble to cover-up ineptitude.

And fear is the currency he’s deployed; fear of the ‘other’, fear of those beyond the border, fear of those nasty people overseas.

The clip below gives a concise time-line of his statements. Unquestionably, he ignored, downplayed and frittered away the opportunity to act. At one stage Covid-19 was a hoax by his opponents; next, it will disappear ‘like a miracle and now it’s the fault of everyone ‘Chinese’. 

While you can criticise China’s response as many have, it remains clear they acted early and with vigour. Moreover, they bought the rest of the world time to respond. Since January 2020, the writing was on the wall. Still, Trump didn’t act. 

The UK and others are no better. Even last week on Friday, March 13th, friends reported going through Heathrow arrivals with no temperature checks, screening or contact tracing. I get temperature checked going to the gym and fill out a contact form.

Whether the UK approach of ‘herd immunity’ will work remains debatable, as only time will tell. This high-risk strategy is gambling with the lives of millions, especially the old folks. 

Yet, as a rationalist, I’m inclined to trust the scientists if they are in the driving seat. Either way, the UK is now part of a massive experiment with terrible consequences if it goes wrong.

My trust in the ‘experts' comes with a substantial caveat in the context of Hong Kong. It’s evident that a few of our local scientists have a personal political agenda that’s infected their work to produce twisted outcomes.

​Professor Yuen Kwok-yung of Hong Kong University stands charged with such behaviour. Although, he’s now back-peddling. That’s why peer review is so crucial in the work of scientists, because some drift into unabashed advocacy. 

Getting back to the Orange Clown in the White House; adopting his approach shouldn’t we be calling the 2009 flu pandemic ‘the San Diego flu’. After all, that city first reported the virus. It went on to kill an estimated half a million people. You must remember the border closures? You don’t, well yes, that’s because they didn’t bother. 

​How about the Bovine Spongiform epidemic that swept Britain in 1986? It causes Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease that continues to this day. Why don't we call it the 'Cornwall Disease' because research suggests it started there. Then let’s blame the Cornish and stop eating their pasties.

Let’s be clear, we are all in this together. It’s time to remember Carl Sagan’s poetic word and put things in perspective.

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 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 posturing, 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. 

Carl Sagan (1934-1996)