On February 14th, 1990, NASA’s Voyager 1 was on its way to leave the Solar System. As it looked back, it took this image. This image completely changed the way we look at our planet and made us wonder if there could possibly be other life out there.
The Pale Blue Dot, an image taken by Voyager 1, is one of the most famous pictures ever taken. Voyager 1 is a space probe destined to explore the outer regions of our Solar System and beyond. In the year 1990, Voyager 1 took its last image, showing a miniscule dot in the deep vastness of space. That miniscule dot is our planet, Earth. Every human, every event, every creation, every memory, all the life we know, all happening on that one small dot. All happening on a small dot within the immensity of space. And this caused people to wonder about how small our planet really is in this vast universe.
These questions inspired famous astronomer and planetary scientist Carl Sagan to write a book called Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future where he states his philosophical reflections from the original image. One of his most famous quotes about the pale blue dot is: “From this 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.”
“Think of all the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors and so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot,” was another one of Sagan’s statements. “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,” said Carl Sagan. The photograph has inspired astronomers to detect Earth-like exoplanets, inspiring improvements for detection capabilities. Astrobiologists and scientists analyze what Earth might look like to interstellar lifeforms. The pale blue dot also inspired many long duration missions to voyage out into the cosmos such as New Horizons.
This is a photograph no one will forget. It is one of the most inspirational and astonishing pictures ever taken. NASA’s JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) put a mosaic of the image, which covers 20 feet, in its Theodore von Kármán Auditorium. Members of NASA mentioned in a 2019 research paper that the mosaic of the image had to be replaced often because so many people touched it. This portrait is the first and only time a spacecraft tried to capture a picture of our Solar System. Fortunately it captured Earth, the pale blue dot. As Carl Sagan said,“Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all the vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only known world to harbor life.”
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