Carl Sagan wrote this line, in a slightly longer form, in the introduction to Pale Blue Dot in 1994. The line has, since his death, become one of those quotes that floats around the internet attached to photographs of distant galaxies, usually presented as a kind of inspirational benediction about human worth in the face of cosmic indifference. The presentation tends to soften the line considerably, in ways that miss what Sagan was actually doing.
What Sagan was actually doing, in the original passage, was something more specific and more uncomfortable than the standard absorption suggests. He was making an argument with a particular structure. The argument was that the cosmic scale of the universe, far from rendering human beings trivial, produces, on close examination, a particular obligation toward each other that the cultural register tends to skip past in its rush to absorb the line as a pleasant sentiment.
The obligation, in Sagan’s framing, is this. Given the scale of the universe, and given the structural unlikelihood that any particular configuration of atoms will, in any given billion-year period, produce a conscious being capable of having a particular set of views, the appropriate response to encountering a conscious being who disagrees with you is not to attempt to silence them. The appropriate response is to let them live.
The argument is not, on close examination, a sentimental one. The argument is a structural one, and the structure is worth taking seriously.
The math underneath the line
The math, in its compressed form, runs something like this. There are approximately a hundred billion galaxies in the observable universe. Each galaxy contains, on average, somewhere between a hundred billion and a trillion stars. Each star may or may not have planets. The planets that exist may or may not be in the narrow band of conditions that permit the chemistry of life. The planets that permit the chemistry of life may or may not, in any given billion-year period, actually produce it. The life that gets produced may or may not, in any given period, produce conscious beings. The conscious beings that get produced will, by structural necessity, be the result of a particular sequence of evolutionary contingencies that, if rerun, would not produce the same beings.
This means that the particular conscious being currently in front of you, the one with the irritating views you would like to dismiss, is, on the available cosmic accounting, structurally unrepeatable. There is no other configuration of atoms anywhere in the observable universe that is, in any meaningful sense, the same configuration as this one. The configuration has views. The views are, in some real way, part of what makes the configuration the configuration it is. If you were to silence the configuration, or in some other way prevent it from existing as itself, you would be removing, from the universe, the only instance of this particular configuration that the universe has, in fourteen billion years, managed to produce.
This is the structural argument Sagan is making. The argument is not that the configuration is precious in some sentimental sense. The argument is that the configuration is precious in a specific structural sense, and that the structural preciousness has practical implications for how one should treat configurations one happens to disagree with.
What the line is, in fact, asking
The line is asking, specifically, that you not respond to disagreement by attempting to remove the disagreeing party from the picture. The removing can take various forms. The literal forms involve violence and silencing. The less literal forms involve the various social and rhetorical maneuvers by which adults attempt to render the disagreeing party either invisible or rhetorically illegitimate, so that their disagreement no longer needs to be engaged with.
Sagan’s argument is that all of these maneuvers, in their various intensities, are operating on a particular implicit assumption that the structural facts about the cosmos do not, on close examination, support. The implicit assumption is that the disagreeing party is, in some sense, replaceable. The replacement might come from elsewhere, or might emerge from converting the disagreer to a different view, or might simply be that the wider population is large enough that the loss of any particular configuration is, in the cosmic scheme, negligible.
The replacement assumption is, on the available evidence, almost exactly wrong. The configuration is not replaceable. The configuration is, in some real way, the only one of its kind that the universe has produced. The loss of the configuration, even by the relatively gentle method of social erasure, is, in some structural sense, a permanent reduction in the total set of conscious configurations the universe currently contains. The wider population does not, by being large, compensate for the loss. The wider population is, more accurately, also composed of configurations that are each, in their own way, also unrepeatable. The largeness is not the relevant variable. The unrepeatability is.
Why this is hard to actually operate on
I want to be honest about why Sagan’s argument, while structurally compelling, is almost impossible to operate on in daily life. The structural facts about cosmic scale are, by their nature, not the variables one’s apparatus is calibrated to attend to in the middle of a disagreement with someone whose views one finds objectionable. The apparatus is, more accurately, calibrated to the much more immediate variables of who is right, who is socially safer to side with, and which response will most effectively neutralize the threat the disagreement seems to pose.
The cosmic perspective is not, in any single moment of disagreement, available as an active piece of the apparatus’s working memory. The cosmic perspective is, more modestly, available as an occasional piece of background framing that one can, in selected moments, bring forward in order to recalibrate how one is operating in the immediate situation. The bringing-forward is the work. The work is, on the available evidence, considerably harder than the standard inspirational reading of the Sagan line suggests.
What helps, in my own experience, is the specific practice of remembering, when I find myself in disagreement with someone whose views I would prefer to dismiss, that the person is, on the available cosmic accounting, the only instance of their particular configuration the universe has ever produced. The remembering does not, by itself, make me agree with them. The remembering does, however, slightly raise the threshold for how I am willing to treat them in the conversation. The slight raising is, in some real way, the practical effect of Sagan’s argument in operation.
The threshold is not raised because I have suddenly become more virtuous. The threshold is raised because I have, briefly, allowed the structural facts about cosmic scale to inform my behavior in a situation where my apparatus would, by default, have operated on the much narrower variables of immediate social positioning. The structural facts have a particular kind of weight that, when allowed into the working memory, modifies what the apparatus is willing to do.
What Sagan was, in some real way, asking us to remember
The harder reading of Sagan’s line is that he was asking the reader to operate, in their immediate interpersonal life, on the basis of facts that are, by their nature, almost impossible to keep continuously present. The cosmic perspective is not, in any sustained way, available as the operating context of daily adult life. The cosmic perspective can, more modestly, be brought forward in selected moments, when one is willing to do the small piece of cognitive work required to bring it forward.
The selected moments, in my own life, have tended to be the moments when I have, by some accident of attention, remembered to look at the situation from outside the situation. The disagreement that, in the immediate frame, has felt important enough to warrant some piece of small rhetorical aggression on my part, has, in the cosmic frame, looked considerably smaller. The disagreer, in the cosmic frame, has looked considerably more like one of the precious unrepeatable configurations Sagan was describing and considerably less like the obstacle to my preferred outcome that the immediate frame had been treating them as.
The shift is small. The shift is also, on the available evidence, the most practical application of the cosmic perspective I have ever managed to make use of. The shift does not happen often enough. The shift, when it happens, has tended to produce, in the disagreement, a different kind of conversation than the one I had been about to have. The different kind of conversation has tended to be the more productive one, not because anyone has been converted to anyone else’s view, but because both parties have been allowed to remain, in the conversation, as the unrepeatable configurations they each, in some structural sense, are.
The acknowledgment this article wants to leave
Sagan was not, on close examination, offering a sentimental observation about human worth. Sagan was making a structural argument about how the facts of cosmic scale ought to inform the ethics of how we treat each other in the small daily disagreements of adult life. The argument is, in some real way, more demanding than the standard absorption allows for. The argument is that the disagreeing party in front of you is, in cosmic terms, an unrepeatable configuration, and that the appropriate response to disagreement is, accordingly, to allow the configuration to continue existing as itself, rather than to attempt to convert, silence, or rhetorically erase it.
This is the harder reading. The harder reading is, in my honest accounting, the reading the original passage was offering. The standard reading has softened it. The softening is, in some real way, what allows the line to be widely shared without producing any of the behavioral change the harder reading would have asked for.
The configuration in front of you is the only one of its kind. The disagreement is real. The letting-live is the work. The work is small in any single instance. The work is, across an adult life, considerable. Sagan was, in some real way, asking us to do it. The asking is, on the available evidence, mostly being received as a pleasant sentiment rather than as the structural demand it actually was.
