No collection of great astronomy photos is complete without this one. In 1990 the spacecraft Voyager 1, having finished its main mission and now hurtling out past the edge of the Solar System into empty space, spun its camera back behind it to view the Earth from over 6 billion kilometres away. This is the picture it took:
The Pale Blue Dot - Earth in a beam of scattered sunlight reflected off Voyager
I won’t attempt to say this better than Carl Sagan famously did:
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.
The orange line is a reflection of sunlight off the spacecraft.
Also, there is a recording of Carl Sagan reading this passage, along with some other stuff to do with this picture, on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnFMrNdj1yY&NR=1
Good link Luke. The funny thing about listening to Carl Sagan talk is there’s always a part of me which thinks he seems like someone trying very hard to sound like Carl Sagan.
[...] No collection of great astronomy photos is complete without this one. [...]
“For thus saith the LORD Who created the heavens, God Himself Who formed the Earth and made it; He hath established it, He created it not in vain, He formed it to be inhabited; I am the LORD, and there is none else.” Isaiah 45: 18