
This
is the "Pale Blue Dot" photograph of the Earth taken by
the Voyager
1 spacecraft. Earth is a tiny dot 4 billion miles distant, about halfway
down in the rightmost streak of sunlight circled in blue
Carl Sagan said the
following quote on May 11, 1996 about what he felt the photo demonstrated[3]:
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 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.
A very
high-resolution version of this image can be obtained from NASA.
The original caption is reprinted below:
This narrow-angle color image of the Earth, dubbed
'Pale Blue Dot', is a part of the first ever 'portrait' of the solar
system taken by Voyager 1. The spacecraft acquired a total of 60 frames
for a mosaic of the solar system from a distance of more than 4 billion miles
from Earth and about 32 degrees above the ecliptic.
From Voyager's great distance Earth is a mere point of light, less than the
size of a picture element even in the narrow-angle camera. Earth was a crescent
only 0.12 pixel
in size. Coincidentally, Earth lies right in the center of one of the scattered
light rays resulting from taking the image so close to the sun. This blown-up
image of the Earth was taken through three color filters -- violet, blue and
green -- and recombined to produce the color image. The background features in
the image are artifacts resulting from the magnification.