QuestionsDoes life have a meaning?Seen from far away, the Earth is a dot: no help will come from elsewhere, the responsibility is ours
Does life have a meaning?A meaning to create

Seen from far away, the Earth is a dot: no help will come from elsewhere, the responsibility is ours

The Pale Blue Dot (Sagan)

Carl Sagan 1934 · 1996Astronomer and science communicator who popularised the demand for solid evidence for extraordinary claims.
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What it claims

We have a responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we have ever known.

Why

Seen from afar, the Earth is a dot with no privileged place and no help comes from elsewhere: the responsibility is ours.

In short

"Seen from far away, the Earth is a dot: no help will come from elsewhere, the responsibility is ours" is an argument by Carl Sagan (Pale Blue Dot, 1994, ch. 1 'You Are Here') on the question "Does life have a meaning?" (answer: a meaning to create). Its claim: We have a responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we have ever known. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P4). AskPhilosophy presents 3 objections, 0 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

Pale Blue Dot, 1994, ch. 1 'You Are Here'
Valid with an implicit premise

In February 1990 the probe Voyager 1, already beyond the planets, is heading away from the Sun. At Carl Sagan's request it turns around and photographs the Earth from about six billion kilometres away: a tiny dot in a ray of light. Four years later Sagan writes a book around this image. He sees a lesson in humility: religions, wars, emperors, all of human history fit on this dot. Nothing suggests that we hold a special place, or that anyone will come to save us from ourselves. Sagan draws a responsibility from it: to treat one another better and to protect our only home.

P1The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena: all of human history has played out on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
P2This view challenges the idea that we hold a privileged position in the Universe.
P3In all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
P4 · implicit premiseIf we are given no privileged place and no outside rescue, the care of our lives and of our planet falls to us alone.
So we have a responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we have ever known.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P4, the computer finds a case where the Earth is a dot, no help comes from elsewhere, and yet nobody has any particular responsibility.
Valid with P4. Without P4, one could grant that the Earth is small and without rescue, without drawing any duty from it. P4 is the bridge between the facts (P1 to P3) and the conclusion, and it is what critics attack. Note that Sagan writes 'to me, it underscores our responsibility': he presents this reading as his own, not as a logical deduction.
Analogy. Castaways on a raft in mid-ocean, with no radio: if they understand that nobody will come, they have good reasons to share the water and mend the raft. The image is ours.

Objections

3

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

Blaise Pascal 1670 · attacks premise 2

Pascal knows the same dizziness: the eternal silence of infinite spaces terrifies him. But for him size does not decide worth. Man is only a reed, the weakest in nature, but a thinking reed: even if the universe crushed him, he would be nobler than what kills him, because he knows he dies. All our dignity consists in thought, not in the space we fill. The smallness of the Earth therefore does not take away our worth.

no reply
We have not yet found a direct reply by Sagan in the texts.
The debate goes on (our summary) Sagan does not discuss Pascal in this passage. A defender of Sagan would say Sagan does not infer from smallness that we are worth little: he targets the pride of a central place, and the same passage ends by asking for more kindness. The two agree on the value of thought. They diverge on what follows: for Pascal the dizziness leads to seeking God, for Sagan it leads to relying on ourselves (our summary).
Where the debate stands (our summary)Core disagreement: faced with the vastness of the world, should we look for meaning beyond us, or build it among ourselves? No agreement (our summary).
Thomas Nagel 1971 · attacks premise 1

Nagel argues that the size and shortness of our life cannot be what makes it absurd, or what strips it of meaning: even a huge or eternal being would face the same problem. The real problem is that we can always step back to a view from which our seriousness seems arbitrary. The view from afar, like the Earth seen from Voyager, therefore adds nothing decisive.

no reply
see the argument
We have not yet found a direct reply by Sagan in the texts.
The debate goes on (our summary) We found no reply by Sagan to Nagel (Nagel's essay dates from 1971, Sagan's book from 1994). A defender of Sagan would say his point is not size but the absence of outside rescue (P3), which Nagel does not discuss. A defender of Nagel would answer that this absence changes nothing either: the step back remains possible, with or without rescue (our summary).
Where the debate stands (our summary)Open point: can the size of the universe take meaning away from our lives? For Nagel no; for Sagan it teaches humility and responsibility. The two are not quite talking about the same thing (our summary).
David Hume 1740 · attacks premise 4

Hume remarks that, in systems of morality, the author passes without warning from propositions about what is to propositions about what ought to be. This new relation needs to be explained: it seems inconceivable how an 'ought' could be deduced from an 'is'. That the Earth is a dot with no rescue does not yet say what we ought to do.

no reply
We have not yet found a direct reply by Sagan in the texts.
The debate goes on (our summary) Sagan does not answer Hume, but he does not claim to deduce a duty from astronomy: he writes 'to me, it underscores our responsibility'. A defender of Sagan would say P4 is a shared value judgement (wanting life to go on), not a hidden deduction. A critic would answer that one must then say where it comes from (our summary).
Where the debate stands (our summary)Core disagreement: do values come from facts or from what we want? Sagan stands on the second side: values are those we choose (our summary).