Pale Blue Dot
This moving speech from Carl Sagan’s book, “Pale Blue Dot”, was inspired by an image taken, at Sagan’s suggestion, by Voyager 1 on February 14, 1990. As the spacecraft was departing our planetary neighborhood for the fringes of the solar system, it turned it around for one last look at its home planet and took this picture from 4 billion miles away.
Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot Speech
From this distant vantage point, the earth might not seem to be of any particular interest, but for us it’s different. 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.
Scripture Indicates That Help Has Come
Contrary to what Sagan says above Scripture claims both that our earth holds a privileged position in the universe and that help has come to save us from ourselves 2,000 years ago in the person of Jesus Christ. Forty days after rising from the dead, Jesus ascended back to heaven and promised to return again at the end of time to gather all who place their trust in Him into a new Kingdom where He shall reign forever.
Listen to the profound words of scripture:
John 3:16-17 . . . (Jesus speaking to Nicodemous) For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.
John 14:1-3 . . . “(Jesus speaking the day before His death) Do not let your hearts be troubled. You believe in God; believe also in me. My Father’s house has many rooms; if that were not so, would I have told you that I am going there to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am.
Genesis 1:1, 26-28, 31 . . . In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth… Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground. God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground”… God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.
Revelation 21:1-7 . . . Then I saw “a new heaven and a new earth,” for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. ‘He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”
He who was seated on the throne (Jesus) said, “I am making everything new!” Then he said, “Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.” He said to me: “It is done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. To the thirsty I will give water without cost from the spring of the water of life. Those who are victorious will inherit all this, and I will be their God and they will be my children.”
How the Celebrated “Pale Blue Dot” Image Came to Be
By Carolyn Porco, February 13, 2020
On February 14, 1990, the Voyager 1 spacecraft directed its cameras to take one last historic array of planetary images. Sitting high above the ecliptic plane, nine years and three months beyond its last planetary encounter with Saturn and four billion miles from the sun, farther than the orbit of Neptune, the spacecraft intercepted and executed a set of instructions to acquire 60 individual exposures of seven of the eight planets, the sun and the vast nothingness in between. This simple sequence of commands and these last images of the of tens of thousands taken by Voyager 1 and its sister craft, Voyager 2, in their journeys across the solar system, capped a groundbreaking era in the coming of age of our species.
A daring, endless trek to the outer planets and beyond, the Voyager mission became iconic over the years in its scope and meaning: more rite of passage than expedition, more mythic than scientific. The extraordinary images of alien worlds never before seen, and the precognitive sense of being there that they evoked, connected laypeople the world over to Voyager’s historic pilgrimage into the unknown, with eternity the final port of call. It was not folly to feel that the mission would gift us all a measure of immortality.
The fabled Golden Record of Voyager heightened the fascination. The two Voyagers each carried a phonograph record of images, music, and sounds representative of our planet, including spoken greetings in 55 languages to any intelligent life-form that might find them. This was a message from Planet Earth vectored into the Milky Way—a hopeful call across space and time to our fellow galactic citizens. It thrilled to think that news of us and our home planet might be retrieved by some extraterrestrial civilization, somewhere and sometime, in the long future of our galaxy.
Because of its never-ending journey, its dazzling scientific discoveries in the solar system, and its human-forward countenance, to participants and onlookers alike, Voyager became symbolic of our acute longing to understand our cosmic place and the significance of our own existence. It left no question of our status as an interplanetary species. It is, even today, the most revered and beloved interplanetary mission of them all, the Apollo 11 of robotic exploration.
Perhaps the most poignant gesture of the Voyager mission was its final parting salute to its place of birth. The portrait of the sun’s family of planets taken in early 1990 included an image of Earth. Carl Sagan, a member of the Voyager imaging team and the captain of the small team that had produced the Golden Record, had proposed this image to the Voyager project in 1981. He eventually called it, appropriately, the Pale Blue Dot. His motivation is expressed in his book of the same name, in which he describes wishing to continue in the tradition begun by the famous Earthrise images of the Apollo program, referring specifically to the one taken from the surface of the moon by Apollo 17. Then, he continues:
It seemed to me that another picture of the Earth, this one taken from a hundred thousand times farther away, might help in the continuing process of revealing to ourselves our true circumstance and condition. It had been well understood by the scientists and philosophers of classical antiquity that the Earth was a mere point in a vast encompassing Cosmos, but no one had ever seen it as such. Here was our first chance.
Though Carl had convinced a small group of Voyager project personnel, and imaging team leader Brad Smith, to provide the required technical, planning, and political support, the project leaders were not willing to spend the resources to do it. Carl’s 1981 proposal was rejected, as were his other proposals over the following seven years.
Completely unaware that Carl had initiated such an effort, I was independently promoting the very same idea—to take an image of the Earth and the other planets—soon after I became an official imaging team member in late 1983. I had in mind the sentimental “goodbye” that would lie at the heart of any image taken of our home planet before Voyager headed out for interstellar space, and the perspective it would give us of ourselves—our small and ever-shrinking place in Voyager’s ever-widening view of our cosmic neighborhood. Also, the “cool factor” in presenting a view of our solar system as alien visitors might see it upon arrival here was another draw.
For two years, I hawked the idea around the project and, not surprisingly, like Carl, got nowhere. But Voyager's project scientist, Ed Stone, did his best to encourage me by advising that if there was some science to be obtained by an image of Earth, it might then be possible. As I couldn’t think of any, I gave up and began instead thinking of other scientific observations of the inner solar system that could be made from the outer solar system. The result: In 1987 we used Voyager 1 to attempt to image the asteroidal dust bands discovered by the Infrared Astronomical Satellite in 1983. Regrettably, nothing was detected.
It wasn’t until 1988 that I finally became aware of Carl’s proposal. After telling him that I had had the same idea a few years earlier—and, like him, tried and failed to get it jump-started—he requested my help, suggesting that I compute the exposure times. (A letter I wrote to Carl after our conversation, in 1988, summarizing that conversation and reporting on my calculations, is archived in the Library of Congress.)
It is an ironic historical footnote to this story that the most difficult calculation of the bunch was the exposure for the Earth. As no spacecraft had ever taken an image of Earth when it was smaller than a pixel, and since the cloudiness of its atmosphere is so variable that its inherent brightness is hard to calculate or predict, there was no information available then to suggest confidently how long an exposure should be. Somehow, it all worked out.
The Pale Blue Dot image of Earth is not a stunning image. But that didn’t matter in the end, because it was the way that Carl romanced it, turning it into an allegory on the human condition, that has ever since made the phrase “Pale Blue Dot” and the image itself synonymous with an inspirational call to planetary brotherhood and protection of Earth.
Considering my history with the concept, it was only natural that only several months after the Pale Blue Dot image was taken, when I learned I would be the leader of the Imaging Team for the Cassini mission to Saturn, I put at the top of my bucket list to do the Pale Blue Dot all over again, only to make it better and make it beautiful. And it occurred to me in the planning of the Cassini redo, how great it would be if we let the people of the world know in advance that their picture would be taken, from a billion miles away—and invite them at the appropriate time to go out, contemplate the isolation of our home in space, appreciate the rarity it is among the sun’s planets, marvel at all of life on Earth, and smile at simply being alive on a pale blue dot.
And we did all that—on July 19, 2013.
“The Day the Earth Smiled” image, with our planet visible below Saturn’s rings.
I called it “The Day the Earth Smiled”. It became a gorgeous image of Saturn and its rings in the foreground and our blue ocean planet, a billion miles in the distance, adrift in a sea of stars.
The significance of images like this—our home seen at significant remove as a mere point of blue light—lies in the uncorrupted, unpoliticized view they offer us of ourselves, a view of all of us together on one tiny dot of a planet, alone in the blackness of space. Our scientific explorations, and images like this, have shown us that there is literally no place else for us to go, to survive and flourish, without extraordinary, and I would submit, unrealizable effort.
Science fiction aside, it may really be that humanity’s last stand is right here on Earth, right where it all began, and the lesson going forward now is: We had better make the best of it.
Carl was right. As he wrote in 1994:
[The Pale Blue Dot] underscores our responsibility ... to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.
In August 2012, in another historic first, Voyager 1 escaped the magnetic bubble of the sun, becoming the first human-made object to enter interstellar space. That glorious historic undertaking, that redefined us every step of the way, had done it again. At that point, our species became interstellar. Thanks to Voyager, we are now card-carrying citizens of the Milky Way.
