The Pale Blue Dot: A Humbling Vision of the Earth
Posted: Monday, April 25, 2011 by Sujith S in Labels: Carl Sagan, Cosmos, Pale Blue Dot, Sujith Surendran
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Launched on September 5th 1977, the Voyager probe was designed to photograph and investigate the outer planets. This was made significantly easier by a planetary alignment, an event that would not be repeated for another 176 years. The plan was dubbed ‘the Grand tour’.
After the probe had completed its mission, Sagan asked for permission to turn the spacecraft around, and to take a photograph of the inner solar system. Bemused, his colleagues rightly stated that no useful scientific data would be gained by such a maneuver, as Voyager was at a distance of over 3.5 billion miles from the Earth.
Sagan, for this one picture, wasn’t interested in data. He wanted to capture an image of the Earth that revealed its stark fragility against the cosmic background. The captured view showed the Earth as a speck of light against a vast, black void. He called it the Pale Blue Dot,
“We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every 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 in 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 the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. 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. It is up to us. It’s been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, 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 and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.
After the probe had completed its mission, Sagan asked for permission to turn the spacecraft around, and to take a photograph of the inner solar system. Bemused, his colleagues rightly stated that no useful scientific data would be gained by such a maneuver, as Voyager was at a distance of over 3.5 billion miles from the Earth.
Seen from 6.1 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles), Earth appears as a tiny dot (the blueish-white speck approximately halfway down the brown band to the right) within the darkness of deep space.
The Pale Blue Dot
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 in 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 the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. 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. It is up to us. It’s been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, 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 and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.