The hashtag #IAmAScientistBecause has been trending on Twitter today, and it’s making me reflect on why I became a scientist. (Well, engineer… but let’s gloss over that distinction.)
Carl Sagan sums it up perfectly. If you’ve never read or heard Sagan on “The Pale Blue Dot,” check out the YouTube link, or read an excerpt below. It’s one of my favorite videos to watch.
From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. 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.
— Carl Sagan
Why am I a scientist? Because Earth and humanity is beautiful, fragile, frustrating and haunting. Why wouldn’t we want to learn as much about it as possible in the short time we have here?