The Pale Blue Dot
From 6 billion kilometers away, Voyager 1 turned its camera back toward home and captured the most distant photograph of Earth ever taken.
Voyager 1 launched on September 5, 1977
Its primary mission was to study Jupiter and Saturn. But Carl Sagan had another idea: before the camera was turned off forever, turn it around and photograph home from the edge of the solar system.
“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us.”
NASA initially resisted the idea
Engineers worried the camera would be damaged if pointed toward the Sun. The image would have no scientific value—Earth would be less than a pixel. But Sagan persisted. On Valentine's Day 1990, Voyager 1 took 60 frames of the solar system. In one of them, Earth appeared.
“On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.”
when photo was taken
Earth occupied in the image
to reach Earth at light speed
“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...”
The photograph changed everything
Scientifically, it was worthless—a blurry dot in a sunbeam. But philosophically, it became one of the most important images ever taken. It showed us what we are: a small, fragile world suspended in the vastness of space.
“...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...”
Earth appears as a tiny point of light, a crescent only 0.12 pixel in size,
suspended in a sunbeam scattered by the camera optics.
“...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.
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.
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.”
