Last week, the NPR program All Things Considered ran a segment on sounds derived from the electromagnetic radiation of sources in outer space. During the segment, they interviewed Jill Tarter, one of the co-founders of the SETI Institute. The segment ended with the follow quote from her:
As Carl Sagan said, we are all made out of stardust. You are actually made out of the remnants of that star that blew up billions of years ago, and the connectedness of life to the Cosmos and the idea of thinking about, maybe, life somewhere else, I think has the opportunity to trivialize the differences among humans on this planet that we find so troublesome.
The bolded portion struck me as a rather strange aspiration, but not one that is altogether uncommon. Indeed, in the quote, she references the late Carl Sagan, who often expressed similar sentiments.
Sagan’s Vision
One of Carl Sagan’s most famous pieces was his meditation on the meaning of a photograph taken of the Earth by the Voyager 1 spacecraft as part of a solar system mosaic it took a few months after passing beyond the orbit of the gas giant Neptune: