The Pale Blue Dot

I LOVE Carl Sagan, so sharing this for Earth Day 2011 was a definite must.  This image of Earth was taken in 1990 by the Voyager 1 spacecraft.  The spacecraft was located about 6.1 billion kilometers (3.8 billion miles) from Earth.  It shows the Earth only as a single blue pixel.  This picture shows no new science, but Carl Sagan proclaimed it to be one of the most important astronomical pictures ever imaged.  It demonstrated how small our planet truly is and that we all share one home in this vast cosmos.  (Can you even see home?  It's the tiny dot inside the yellow streak near the top center.)

Taken in 1990 by NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft, the "pale blue dot" photo shows what our planet looks like from nearly 4 billion miles away. Earth is the tiny speck of light near the top in the brighter streak. The pale streak over Earth is an artifact of sunlight scattering in the camera's optics.

The YouTube video below (or this newer alternate version) shares Carl Sagan's thoughts on the Pale Blue Dot.  Definitely worth watching if you've never seen before and worth watching again.  Sagan is quite the poet here - an emotional tribute to Earth.

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. 

~ Carl Sagan (1934-1996) The Pale Blue Dot 1994

Happy Earth Day Everyone!  Eyes to the skies!  You'll be amazed by what you see!!  AstroChick.