The Pale Blue Dot
A Tribute to Carl Sagan -- with Joni Mitchell, the JWST, a boy from Glasgow Village and all things made of "Star stuff."
To Carl Sagan …
With a special message (below)
Joni Mitchell sat alone in a New York City hotel room on a cloudy Monday morning in August 1969. She had appeared on the Dick Cavitt Show the night before, but all weekend she focused on television as events unfolded at the mammoth rock concert site 100 miles north near the town of Bethel, NY.
Though she didn’t perform there, the magnitude of the “Woodstock Music and Art Fair” — the official name of the concert — stirred her imagination and immense talent.
"The deprivation of not being able to go provided me with an intense angle on Woodstock," she told an interviewer shortly after the event
Within hours, Mitchell wrote the iconic song “Woodstock.”1
We are “Stardust”
“Well I came upon a child of God, he was walking along the road … “
The song celebrates the Age of Aquarius generation. It is an homage to the half-million young people who turned a muddy, gridlocked field on Max Yasgur’s farm in Bethel into a generational symbol of peace and love.
The opening lines tell of a spiritual journey: “I’ve got to get back to the land that set my soul free.” But it is the refrain that is both figurative and literal and is easy to overlook on a song filled with vibrant imagery.
“We are stardust, we are golden,
We are billion-year-old carbon.
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden.” — Woodstock (Joni Mitchell)
The refrain is more than a mixed metaphor. Or an idealistic petition.
It is true.
We really are Stardust. (See Carl Sagan below)
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s cover of “Woodstock” … (with lyrics).
Carl Sagan: “We are made of star stuff”
A decade later, Carl Sagan – scientist, cosmologist and visionary – confirmed Mitchell’s lyric in his book Cosmos (1980), a companion piece to the PBS documentary of the same name.
“The cosmos is within us. We are made of star stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.”
Sagan wasn't being metaphoric. Or hyperbolic. He was noting—in his uniquely precise and poetic way—that the raw materials that constitute our physical bodies were forged in the bellies of distant, long-extinguished stars.
About 98 percent of all living things are made up of six basic elements — hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, calcium and phosphorus — endlessly constituted and reconstituted over billions of star births and deaths.
When stars die, they collapse, then explode, blasting the ingredients of life into space before coalescing again (and again) elsewhere in the universe. The cycle repeats in perpetuity. That is how the Milky Way has formed... and our Solar System … and Earth … and us.
This cosmic crucible has fancy names – nucleosynthesis and galactic chemical evolution – but in the end, it’s true –
All things living – including us – are made of Stardust.
Pretty cool, huh?
Dreaming
As a boy, I stared at the stars from the backyard terrace of our little house on Cameron Road in Glasgow Village, MO, just north of St. Louis about a mile from the Mississippi River. I would wait for a shooting star, not to wish, but to wonder.
Then I’d spot one … a flash of a second .... a streak of white silver ... then it was gone. My adolescent mind couldn't comprehend that it was a rice grain-sized meteorite slamming into the atmosphere. I thought maybe it was a message, a sign that the cosmos was saying hello. More than anything else, I wondered.
That feeling has never left. Not even six decades later.
First came the Hubble Space Telescope in 1990. Then Hubble’s successor, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), was launched on Christmas Day 2021.
The JWST was set to peer into creation further than any before it, further than anyone could imagine.
When it did, the boy from Glasgow Village awakened.
JWST: Looking back in time
The most ambitious space telescope ever created (Cost: $10 billion), JWST began transmitting the wonders of the universe in July 2022 after settling into orbit about 1 million miles above Earth.
JWST gazed back in time to the birth of the universe 13.8 billion years ago, taking images of nebulae, quasars, supernovas, exoplanets (planets outside our solar system) and primordial galaxies, some born as early as 250 million years after the Big Bang.
The images are stunning …
The knowledge JWST has gathered is astonishing.
In 1929, astrophysicist Edwin Hubble made the startling discovery that the universe is expanding, Scientists today are seeing light waves2 from the earliest galaxies that were originally emitted 13-plus billion years ago. However, because the universe is expanding these same galaxies are now more than 30 billion light years away and no longer part of the “visible universe.”3
JWST examines how stars are born, how they die, how galaxies evolve and collide, and how objects of great mass warp space and time.
The JWST’s mission also includes the Holy Grail of Astronomy – the search for extraterrestrial life. It is well-equipped to explore habitable exoplanets, including the detection and makeup of atmospheres, measuring electromagnetic forces and tracing orbits in the Goldilocks zone.4
If ET is out there, JWST may find him. And we made need his help.
The Pale Blue Dot
A reminder from Dr. Sagan to all of us, including the little boy from Glasgow Village made of Stardust.
Click for Audio (then come back and read along)
“… Consider again 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 the 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 posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion we have some privileged position in the universe are challenged by this point of pale light.
Our planet. It’s 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 can migrate. Visit? Yes. Settle? Not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, 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, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
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Jim Geschke was inducted into the prestigious Marquis Who’s Who Registry in 2021.
Mitchell first performed the song live later in 1969, then recorded it for her album Ladies of the Canyon (April 1970). It was also released as a single on the B-side of “Big Yellow Taxi.” A month earlier, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young recorded their cover of the song for their album Déjà Vu (March 1970). The CSNY cover was the best-known version and became an instant rock classic.
In the form of Ultraviolet light. This light has “red-shifted,” meaning because of the massive distance traveled the light waves have “stretched” on the prism spectrum from blue to red. It is known as the Doppler Effect.
“Visible Universe” means just that, the distance limit to which we can actually see interstellar objects.
“The Goldilocks Zone” is the zone where a planet’s orbit is close enough to its parent star that it receives enough light and energy to sustain life.
Excellent Jim! I've often thought about how we are all connected, at an atomic level. All the living things. That Joni Mitchell quote says it all:
“We are stardust, we are golden,
We are billion-year-old carbon.
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden.”
If we could only remember how really insignificant we are in the whole scheme of things, maybe the world would be more fun. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Thanks for the words for thought.
Wait! I was told that I was the Goldilocks Zone! Blasphemy! Good article Jim and as always a great reminder that we are all walking starts...