A Pale Blue Dot

author: none

Feb 13, 2020


Thirty years ago today, on February 14, 1990, the spacecraft Voyager 1 took its last sixty images. Voyager 1 had been launched years earlier, in 1977, and was leaving the solar system having passed by Jupiter and Saturn in 1979 and 1980.

Before the imaging system was turned off to save power in 1990, Carl Sagan campaigned for one final use of the camera as it left the planetary neighborhood for the fringes of the solar system - that it be turned around to make a “family portrait” of the eight planets Mercury to Neptune.

Among those images is one of our planet taken from 3.7 billion miles away, out past Pluto. Earth appears as a tiny point of light, occupying less than one pixel, caught in a splash of scattered sunlight (a result of the Sun being just outside the frame). The image is famous and NASA has just released a reprocessed version which uses modern image-processing software and techniques to revisit the view, while respecting the original data and intent of those who planned the images.

The filters on the camera were selected for scientic observation and not designed to make “true color” images. However the frames could be processed to render approximately accurate colors. In the new picture each color channel was rebalanced so that the beam of reflected sunlight appears like the white light of the Sun.

Half an hour after this image was taken, the camera was turned off for ever. Sagan’s own commentary, which follows the image, emphasises his intent that this artifact, though made possible by extraordinary human talents, should speak to our, often darker, selves.

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, “Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space”, 1994

The image was processed by JPL engineer and image processing enthusiast Kevin M. Gill with input from two of the image’s original planners, Candy Hansen and William Kosmann.