This is part 2 of a two-part column series by Aju Media Group's senior columnist Abe Kwak.
5. The Pale Blue Dot: Ithaca for All Humanity
Let us leave, for a moment, the Mediterranean of Odysseus and turn our eyes toward space.
Voyager 1, launched in 1977, photographed Earth on February 14, 1990, from a distance of roughly 6 billion kilometers.
Against the immensity of space, Earth appeared smaller than a single pixel — a tiny point suspended in a shaft of sunlight.
Carl Sagan transformed the image into one of humanity’s most enduring symbols of self-understanding:
the Pale Blue Dot.
Everything in human history happened on that dot.
The Trojan War.
Homer’s songs.
Odysseus’s Ithaca.
The land walked by Jesus.
The place where the Buddha awakened.
The worlds of Confucius and Laozi.
The Korea in which the 20th-century religious thinker Dasuk Ryu Young-mo contemplated heaven, humanity and the meaning of existence.
Every empire human beings built, every religion they founded, every revolution they fought, every war, every love, every hatred, every triumph and every failure — all occurred on that tiny point.
The Pale Blue Dot reveals two apparently contradictory truths.
Human beings are infinitesimally small before the universe.
And yet human beings are capable of understanding that smallness.
We can imagine the scale of the cosmos and ask what our existence within it means.
We are not the center of the universe.
Yet we can look at the universe and reflect upon ourselves.
We are mortal, yet we contemplate eternity.
We are imperfect, yet imagine perfection.
We know we will die, and still we love, have children, build civilizations and attempt to leave something behind for generations we will never meet.
Perhaps human greatness lies not in imagining ourselves to be the center of existence, but in recognizing how small we are and nevertheless choosing to live meaningfully.
Then perhaps this pale blue Earth is the largest Ithaca humanity will ever share.
For centuries we have fought over religion, ethnicity, borders, ideology, skin color and language.
Seen from space, all those conflicts occur within a single tiny point.
To love human beings, respect cultures and live together with nature is therefore more than noble rhetoric.
It is among the most practical conditions for sustaining civilization on this fragile planet.
And here I am reminded of the Korean thinker Dasuk Ryu Young-mo.
Dasuk’s achievement did not lie in mixing religions together until their differences disappeared.
Christianity and Buddhism are not the same.
Confucianism and Daoism are not the same.
Their understandings of the Absolute, the human being, salvation, awakening, world and life emerged from different histories and different languages.
Erasing differences is not spiritual convergence.
Dasuk’s distinctive form of religious dialogue began by respecting those differences while listening for the deepest questions that different scriptures direct toward human beings.
At the bottom, one question returns:
How will you live?
Dasuk studied the Bible intensely while engaging Buddhism, Confucianism and Daoist thought.
He used the Korean word jena to describe the self-centered ego — the self that grasps, possesses and insists upon itself.
Against it he developed the idea of eolna, a uniquely Korean expression pointing toward the true or higher self, the human spirit awakening beyond ego toward a greater dimension of truth.
Put in Dasuk’s language, jena wants to pull everything toward itself.
To possess more.
To win more.
To rise higher.
It resembles, at another philosophical level, the Buddhist diagnosis of greed, anger and delusion.
The human being moving toward eolna, by contrast, learns to observe desire, discipline it and move beyond the narrow self toward a greater world of truth and life.
Seen through such eyes, the voyage of Odysseus acquires another meaning.
The Cyclops, Sirens, Circe and the storms are not only outside him.
Greed is inside us.
Pride is inside us.
Anger, fear and revenge are inside us.
The most formidable adversary a human being confronts over a lifetime may finally be oneself.
Odysseus’s journey toward Ithaca can therefore also be read as an inner odyssey:
a voyage from the ego-bound jena toward the deeper center of eolna.
The Bible raises this essential question in another way.
Jesus did not seek merely to abolish religious law. His conflicts arose when law, having lost its original purpose of sustaining human life, hardened into formalism or became an instrument of power.
He healed on the Sabbath.
He ate with tax collectors and people treated as sinners.
He touched lepers.
He welcomed children.
Again and again the question was not merely whether a rule had been observed.
The deeper question was:
Whom does the rule serve? What kind of life does it protect?
The parable of the Good Samaritan makes the point with breathtaking clarity.
A man lies beaten beside the road.
Religiously respected figures pass him by.
Then a Samaritan — someone viewed with suspicion by many Jews of that period — stops.
He treats the man’s wounds.
Takes him to an inn.
Pays for his care.
The important question is not who knows the most law.
It is:
Who became a neighbor to the wounded man?
Again and again, the Bible treats the way a society deals with widows, orphans and strangers as a test of justice and faith.
Faith reveals itself not simply in how often one invokes God’s name, but in how one treats the vulnerable.
The words of the Gospel of John — “the truth will set you free” — also sound newly urgent in the age of AI.
Freedom does not mean merely doing whatever one wishes.
There is a deeper freedom:
freedom from falsehood;
freedom from slavery to appetite;
freedom to confront truth and accept the consequences of choosing it.
AI can generate language.
That does not mean it knows truth.
An abundance of information is not the same as wisdom.
The ability to generate millions of sentences does not itself entail moral responsibility for what those sentences do in the world.
The final responsibility for judging what is true, choosing the truth and bearing the consequences remains human.
Buddhism approaches the human problem from another direction.
The Heart Sutra teaches:
“Form is emptiness; emptiness is form.”
Emptiness is not simple nihilism.
It points toward the insight that no phenomenon exists as an eternally fixed, completely independent substance. Things arise through causes, conditions and relationships.
Seen from the Buddhist understanding that intrinsic, independent self-nature is empty, Odysseus himself cannot be Odysseus alone.
Because Penelope exists, he is a husband.
Because Telemachus exists, he is a father.
Because Ithaca exists, he is a king and a homecomer.
Because companions sailed beside him, he was a commander.
So it is with us.
We become who we are through family and friends, society and nation, history and culture, nature and Earth, and even generations not yet born.
Laozi’s Daodejing speaks of another kind of strength:
“The highest goodness is like water.”
Water nourishes all things without contending with them.
It seeks the low places others avoid.
And yet, over time, soft water can reshape stone.
Human civilization has too often understood strength only as the capacity to dominate, conquer and prevail.
Laozi points toward another strength:
the strength to descend;
the strength not to contend;
the strength that sustains life.
Odysseus, too, does not reach Ithaca through strength and cunning alone.
He is a king who hides his name.
A famous hero who returns to his own palace dressed as a beggar.
To proclaim oneself endlessly is not maturity.
Sometimes the greater power is the ability to become low like water.
The Book of Changes, or I Ching, places change at the center of existence.
Nothing remains fixed forever.
Day becomes night.
Winter becomes spring.
Prosperity declines.
Decline can become renewal.
Individuals change.
Companies change.
Nations change.
Civilizations change.
One of the tradition’s enduring formulations reads:
When things reach an impasse, they change; through change they find a way; finding a way, they endure.
The age of AI is profoundly an age of yi — of change.
Jobs are changing.
Corporations are changing.
Journalism and education are changing.
The relationship between human beings and machines is changing.
Yet to accept change does not mean accepting everything merely because it is new.
We must decide what should change and what must be defended.
Technology and institutions must evolve.
Truth, justice, human dignity, freedom, responsibility and reverence for life must not simply be swept away by the velocity of technological change.
The Confucian Doctrine of the Mean asks how human beings maintain moral centeredness in a world of motion.
Its opening lines speak of human nature, the Way and cultivation:
“What Heaven confers is called human nature; to follow that nature is called the Way; cultivating the Way is called education.”
To understand the “mean” as merely splitting the difference between two sides is to miss the point.
The center is not mediocrity.
It is the capacity to discover what is fitting and right amid constantly changing circumstances.
AI confronts us with the same demand.
We must neither worship AI as a god nor fear it as a demon.
We cannot simply refuse technology.
Nor can we surrender humanity to technology.
To use it without becoming its servant;
to develop it while accepting responsibility;
to increase efficiency without sacrificing human dignity —
this may be a new expression of the Mean for the age of AI.
These scriptures and traditions arise from different languages and histories.
There is no need to force them into sameness.
Yet, through the dialogical vision associated with Dasuk Ryu Young-mo, one can descend beneath their differences and encounter recurring human questions.
How we live matters at least as much as what we profess to believe.
What we choose matters at least as much as what we know.
What we can relinquish matters at least as much as what we possess.
And knowing where to return may matter at least as much as knowing how high we can climb.
6. Humanity Needs a Second Odyssey
Looking back, human history has largely been an outward odyssey.
We searched for more land.
Built larger empires.
Created faster ships, railways, automobiles and aircraft.
We sent spacecraft beyond Earth.
The internet connected the planet.
And now we have created AI systems capable of imitating aspects of our language and thought.
But perhaps the journey humanity most urgently needs is no longer only outward.
We need an odyssey inward.
A voyage back toward ourselves.
In Dasuk’s language, from jena toward eolna.
Freedom is not the realization of every desire.
A deeper freedom emerges when a person can govern desire.
Success is not possessing everything one wants.
Sometimes success is knowing what must be surrendered.
The human beings we need are not those who can know more than machines.
We need human beings capable of judging what is right.
Not people who calculate faster than machines, but people willing to accept responsibility for their judgments.
Not simply people who produce more, but people capable of asking what is truly worth producing.
As AI grows more powerful, human inner maturity may become more important than human external ability.
This is not an argument for fearing technology.
Nor for rejecting it.
It is an argument that human ethics and responsibility must develop at a pace commensurate with technological power.
Civilization becomes dangerous when the moral maturity of the human beings using a technology falls behind the power of the technology itself.
The question Oppenheimer asked in the atomic age has returned in a new form in the AI age.
AI can analyze every great love poem ever written.
But taking the hand of someone we love and sharing that person’s suffering remains a human act.
AI can explain thousands of years of philosophy concerning justice.
But whether I remain silent before injustice or stand against it is a choice I must make.
AI can define freedom.
It cannot bear my responsibility for what I do with freedom.
AI can calculate the dangers of climate change.
But the decision to sacrifice some present convenience in order to protect nature for future generations belongs to humanity.
AI can calculate the fastest course to Ithaca.
But human beings must decide what their Ithaca is.
That is our freedom.
And that is our responsibility.
Human beings will always need an Ithaca.
And so we return to where we began:
From the world of the gods to the world of man.
This does not mean humanity expelled God.
Still less does it mean that humanity became God.
It means that as human beings awakened to themselves as creatures capable of thought and choice, they also acquired responsibility for those choices.
The greater the freedom, the greater the responsibility.
The stronger the technology, the stronger the ethics must become.
The greater the knowledge, the deeper the humility required.
Seen from space, all of us live upon a Pale Blue Dot.
Kings and the poor live there.
Christians and Buddhists.
Easterners and Westerners.
People divided by ideology.
All live upon the same small planet.
Our wealth, power, fame and wars cannot escape it.
Perhaps, then, the greatest things human beings can do on this small world are simpler than we imagine:
To defend truth.
To choose justice.
To love freedom while accepting responsibility.
To love other human beings.
To respect cultures different from our own.
To live with nature rather than against it.
To leave the next generation a world slightly better than the one we inherited.
This, I believe, is the humanism we must rebuild in the age of AI.
The goal is not to become stronger than machines.
It is to become more fully human.
The more machines resemble us, the more urgently we must remember what humanity is.
Three thousand years ago Homer sent one man onto the sea.
Odysseus crossed war and storm, gods and monsters, desire and temptation, and at last returned to the place to which he belonged.
It was not the world’s greatest empire.
It was a small island called Ithaca.
Yet to him it mattered more than any empire.
The people he loved were there.
The people for whom he was responsible were there.
The life that reminded him who he was was there.
Three thousand years later Christopher Nolan summons that ancient man onto the screen again.
And he asks those of us who have created a new presence called artificial intelligence:
Where are we going?
What are we racing so quickly to acquire?
What are we losing along the way?
And when this long voyage ends, where shall we return?
Perhaps civilization’s progress cannot be measured only by its ability to go faster, higher and farther.
Perhaps an even greater progress lies in remembering, however far we travel, where we began;
in remembering what we set out to protect;
and in knowing where, at the end, we must return.
For Homer’s Odysseus, that place was Ithaca.
For Dasuk Ryu Young-mo, it was the ascent from jena toward eolna.
In the Bible, it is the path of truth and love.
In the Heart Sutra, it is the wisdom of emptiness that releases attachment.
For Laozi, it is the way of water flowing toward the low places.
In the Book of Changes, it is the wisdom of changing without losing the Way.
In the Doctrine of the Mean, it is maintaining moral centeredness amid the extremes of the world.
And in Carl Sagan’s cosmic vision, it is the Pale Blue Dot we must protect together.
The Ithaca we seek today must therefore be a world in which truth, justice and freedom remain alive — a world in which humanity, culture and nature breathe together rather than destroy one another.
Homer’s Odysseus returned to Ithaca.
Humanity’s odyssey is not yet over.
Now that AI resembles human intelligence, robots increasingly resemble human physical agency, and machines have begun to speak in human language, we must ask the human question at a deeper level than ever before.
What must remain, irreducibly, human?
What must human beings continue to take responsibility for?
And what is the final purpose of this immense adventure we call civilization?
The answer will not belong simply to those who are stronger, richer or faster.
The future may belong to human beings who are more truthful;
more just;
free, yet capable of responsibility;
able to feel another person’s pain;
able to respect cultures unlike their own;
able to live with nature;
and humble enough to know that they spend only a brief moment upon a Pale Blue Dot suspended in an immense universe.
In the age of myth, human beings asked the gods for directions.
In the age of philosophy, they asked reason.
In the age of science, they asked the laws of nature.
In the age of AI, human beings will ask the machines they created for an endless number of answers.
But however powerful artificial intelligence becomes, there is one final question we must never hand over to a machine:
How should I live?
The moment we surrender that question, we become Odysseus without Ithaca.
We may build the most powerful AI ever imagined.
We may reach the farthest regions of space.
But we will have lost home.
That is why the story Homer began 3,000 years ago is not over.
Nolan has placed the ancient question on the modern screen.
But the person who must answer it is neither Homer nor Christopher Nolan.
Nor AI.
It is us.
Where are we sailing now?
And after all the storms and temptations of this long voyage have passed, what kind of human beings will we be when we finally return?
7. Westward With the Woman He Loves: The Final Voyage of Odysseus
Nolan goes one step beyond the point at which Homer closes his story.
At the end of the film, Telemachus becomes the new king of Ithaca.
Odysseus and Penelope leave the island and sail once more into the open sea.
This time the voyage is not toward Troy.
It is not a voyage of war.
Nor is it a homecoming undertaken to reclaim a stolen throne.
Odysseus carries with him the memory of those who fought beside him and never returned, along with the burden of war, death, guilt and responsibility.
And with Penelope beside him, he sails west.
I would like to read that western sea as humanity’s final Ithaca.
The West is where the sun goes down.
Where the day ends.
Where a life moves toward evening.
Where human beings, having passed through all the years granted to them, cross toward something beyond the horizon.
One may read it as the final return of a human being who was born into the world, loved and fought, succeeded and failed, endured countless desires, sufferings and relationships, and at last turns back toward the source from which life came.
The throne is relinquished.
Power is relinquished.
The title of war hero is relinquished.
What remains at the end is a man and a woman.
Odysseus and Penelope.
After almost 20 years of separation, war, waiting and wandering, the two who found one another again now sail together toward the setting sun.
Perhaps human beings have an Ithaca to which they must return while still alive.
And perhaps there is also a greater Ithaca to which, one day, life itself must return.
At this scene, I am reminded of the concluding mantra of the Buddhist Prajñāpāramitā Hṛdaya Sūtra, the Heart Sutra:
Gate gate pāragate pārasaṃgate bodhi svāhā.
No single translation can exhaust the Sanskrit.
But in the language of this essay, and beside the final voyage of Odysseus, I would like to hear it this way:
Go. Go. Go beyond.
Go altogether beyond the beyond.
Go toward awakening.
Or, rendered still more freely in the language of Odysseus:
Go. Let us go again.
Cross this sea of life and go beyond.
Beyond desire, beyond fear, beyond attachment —
until at last we return to where we belong.
Three thousand years ago, a man set out from Troy for Ithaca.
On the sea he lost almost everything.
He lost his companions.
He lost his youth.
He confronted his own pride and desire.
Yet he returned.
And now he departs once more.
This time not to win.
Not to conquer.
Not to become a king.
But to relinquish everything and travel farther with the person he loves.
Perhaps this is the final odyssey given to every human being.
We are born and enter the world.
We learn.
We love.
We struggle.
We work.
We dream.
We succeed.
We fail.
We raise children.
We hand our place to the next generation.
And in the end we begin the journey back toward wherever it was that we came from.
If so, must death be understood only as an absolute ending?
If the voyage from Troy to Ithaca was a homecoming for Odysseus, might the final journey westward also be read as a homecoming of a greater kind?
In Homer’s world, human beings ask the gods to show them the way.
In Nolan’s world, human beings carry their memory, guilt, love and responsibility and venture onto the sea themselves.
And those of us living in the age of AI must ask ourselves again:
Where did I come from?
What have I lived for?
What will I leave to the next generation?
And where, at the end, will I return?
Humanity is now creating the most powerful instruments of intelligence in its history.
But no matter how extraordinary the technology becomes, we cannot outsource the answer to those questions.
The final course must be chosen by human beings themselves.
Toward truth.
Toward justice.
Toward freedom.
Toward a world that loves human beings, respects cultures and lives in harmony with nature.
And, finally, toward the greater Ithaca to which all of us must one day return.
Gate gate pāragate pārasaṃgate bodhi svāhā.
Go.
Let us go again.
Across this sea of life, let us go beyond.
The voyage of Odysseus does not simply end there.
At last, it begins the greater homecoming.
*The author is a senior columnist of AJP.
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