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Decided to translate legendary words of great Carl Sagan to Serbo-Croatian (or Bosnian if you like) language. Added some photos too. Too important not to be translated into as many languages as we can.

 

Here’s full text.

Serbo-Croatian

—– Blijeda plava tacka —–

Za nekoga koji gleda sa ove daljine, Zemlja ne izgleda nimalo intersentna. Ali za  nas, je to je vec drugacije. Razmotrimo ponovo ovu tacku. To je ovdje, to je dom, to smo mi. Na njoj, svi koje volimo, svi koje znamo, svi za koje smo ikad culi.Svako ljudsko bice koje je ikad postojalo, zivili su tu. Sve nase radosti i patnje, hiljade samouvjerenih religija, ideologija, i ekonomskih doktrina, svaki lovac i tragac, svaki heroj i kukavica, svaki tvorac i unistivac civilizacija, svaki kralj i seljak, svaki zaljubljeni par, svaka majka i otac, djete sa nadom, pronalazac i istrazivac, svaki ucitelj morala, svaki korumpirani politicar, svaka “super zvijezda”, svaki vrhovni vodja, svaki svetac i grijesnik u istoriji naseg svijeta zivio je ovdje – na truncici prasine suspendovane na suncevoj zraci.

Zemlja je vrlo mala pozornica u prostranoj kozmickoj areni. Razmislite samo o krvi koju su generali i imperatori prolili samo da bi u slavi i triumfu, mogli da postanu privremeni gospodari samo malog djela ove tacke. Razmislite samo o beskrajnim okrutnostima koje su stanovinici sa jednog krajicka ove tacke pocinili nad stanovnicima drugog, jedva prepoznatljivog, djela, kako su cesti njihovi nesporazumi, kako su zeljni da ubijaju jedni druge, kake su zestoke njihove mrznje.

Nasa usamljenost, nasa umisljena samovaznost, obmana da mi imamo specijalnu privilegiju u Svemiru, je dovedena u pitanje ovim trackom blijede svjetlosti. Nasa planeta je usamljeno zrnce u velikom omotacu kosmicke tame. U nasoj zavucenosti, u svom ovom prostranstvu, nema nagovjestaja da ce pomoc doci od nekle drugdje da nas spase od samih nas. Zemlja je jedini svijet za koji znamo da podrzava zivot. Ne postoji nigdje drugdje,  bar ne u bliskoj buducnosti, gdje ljudska rasa moze da migrira. Posjetiti, da. Nastaniti se, ne jos. Voljeli ili ne, Zemlja je gdje mi moramo opstati.

Receno je da je astronomoja iskustvo koje pravi covjeka skromnijim i gradi karakter. Mozda i nema bolje demonstracije gluposti ljudskog samozadovoljstva od ove dalake slike naseg malog svijeta. Za mene, naglasava odgovornost da tretiramo ljubazno jedni druge, i da sacuvamo i njegujemo nasu blijedu malu tacku,

jedini dom koji imamo.

 

English

—-The Pale Blue Dot—-

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Look again at 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 a 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 that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is 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 could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the 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.

Warning: Words nothing and something are used a lot in this article so I suggest reading it slowly and really trying to imagine what the sentence is trying to imply. To make it easier to spot, every time you see nothing in italics it will imply the state, and not the the word, in linguistic sense. For example the word nothing in the sentence  “today I did nothing” simply implies that today I did not do anything. But the famous question “why there’s something rather than nothing?” implies the state of nothingness which will be in italics. Same goes for the word something.

Let us first define nothing. Nothing is when there’ no anything. I am not talking about linguistic tricks here for the word nothing. Like mathematical nothing (zero) or logical nothing (I have nothing drawn on this paper). I mean nothing in the most literal sense of the world. No matter, no time, no light, no dark,  no space, no dimensions, no thoughts, no observers, no abstract. Pretty much, no anything. Nothing is simply put “the absence of everything. Still hard to comprehend? Of course it is… but will get to that later.

Is nothing a default state before the existence of anything? Was there really a “before”. Before there was something, was there really nothing? Is nothing a default state from which everything start existing (or got created)? Many assume that the default state of our universe has to be nothing, and that the something came right after. Meaning; at the beginning there was nothing. Nothing existed, not even nothingness, and then our Universe got created (or appeared) out of that nothing. Now, why would this have to be true? Is nothingness more natural state than something? Is nothing a default state? There is no good or logical reason to think that. As a matter of fact, the opposite is what’s probably true. Or at least what is known so far.

First of all, It’s impossible for humans to imagine nothing. Even if you close your eyes and try really hard to imagine nothing, you will not be able to do it. Not only that you would have to imagine that there is no matter, atoms, light or the actual Universe, but you would also have to imagine that there is no space, time, thoughts or even an observer. Which in this case would be you, so nothing is contradiction in philosophical spectrum already. Moving on…

Can you image no space? Can you imagine spaceless …uhmm what…space? A state with no space? You can’t, because you still need an observer to deduct that kind of reasoning. Nothing, simply cannot be observed, because if it can be, then it would imply an observation from the outside. If we can observe nothing from the outside then you don’t have nothingness. If we can observe nothing from the inside, the same applies;from the inside of what?. What about with no observer? Of course not. It’s silly.
So why is it so hard to imagine it? It is hard because our conscious brain doesn’t know what nothing is. Our brain hasn’t evolved the need to know that. Nothing simply makes no sense whatsoever. In the whole history of human civilisation and the Universe, state of nothing does not exist. We have never encountered or dealt with nothing. Ever. Not even in the vacuum of space. We know that vacuum is not totally empty. But even if it was; even if you were somehow able to suck everything out of the vacuum, you will still have space and time left. Empty space doesn’t mean nothing. There’s still space left.There is no such a thing as nothing. So our brain doesn’t need to worry about it.
Now, many will say “but what if some intelligence created everything from nothing?”. But that implies that some kind of intelligence exited while there was nothing, it existed alongside with nothing,  immediately making the whole point silly. But lets say we did allow for existence of that kind if intelligence along side with nothing, then we would go into infinite regression. Who created the intelligence? Did that intelligence arose from nothing? Did  the intelligence always existed? How come that intelligence can exists? You might say “well it always existed”. (First Cause argument). Then I could say “ if the intelligence always existed, then we can use the same logic to say that the Universe (in one form of another) always existed. Why add unnecessary complexity? Why add the middle “man” where there is no evidence for it?

So why would we even start to think that there was nothing before something? Why would we even suppose such a question in the first place; when all of our senses, all of our data, all of our history shows that there was always (and still is) something. I bet you can’t name an event in our known history when there was nothing. Even the first law of thermodynamics confirms that. Law states that matter cannot be created nor destroyed. Let’s break that down:

matter cannot be created –  If nothing indeed existed, then matter would be absent and would clearly violate this law.
matter cannot be destroyed – matter can only change its form so regardless how hard we tried, there would always be something.

Then why in the hell would we ever assume that everything got created form nothing in the first place? when all our logic and data shows that something (in one form or another) always existed.
To me it looks like humans are never taking the simplest answer for granted. We have to invent problems and then find unnecessary solution for the same. Be that for religious or personal reason, I have no idea, but most of the times the simplest and the most elegant solution is the correct one. In our case, something always existed is the best and the most elegant solution. You also might have a hard time to wrap your head around “something always existed”, but when you really think about it long and hard, there is no other solution for now. Nothing simply does not make sense and I really don’t see a way around this.
So how else do we know that nothing never exited? Logic, deductive reasoning and data. That’s how. We know that the same way we know that Santa Claus doesn’t exist, has never existed and probably never will. No evidence or data whatsoever. No sane logic supports it. We know that it is true the same way we know that Hitler did exists. Tons of evidence for his existence. So why would anyone assume that Hitler did not exists and Santa Claus did? Because essentially they are using the same logic; discarding the current data while using the data that doesn’t exist, by trying to prove that something came out of nothing. In my opinion the sole question “why there’s something rather than nothing?” is meaningless. If there was indeed nothing instead of something, then we wouldn’t have any observers (you can’t have “something” while nothing exists at the same time) and would not be able to ask this question anyway. As Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy so eloquently put it  when asked the question; Why is there something rather than nothing? Their answer was: “Well, why not? Why expect nothing rather than something? No experiment could support the hypothesis ‘There is nothing’ because any observation obviously implies the existence of an observer.”