Today, Valentine’s Day, 35 years ago, our tiny world, lost in a sunbeam, was imaged from a billion kilometers. Have we learned anything in the intervening time?
Updated image of The Pale Blue Dot lost in a sunbeam. Click to save the high-res image. Image via NASA/JPL. Full resolution image (10 mb, 5230×5175)
Today we celebrate the 35th anniversary of the iconic and timeless image known as “The Pale Blue Dot”, first published on this day in 1990.
We published a story on November 26 of last year, celebrating the late, great Carl Sagan’s 90th birthday on November 9th. His words are more meaningful, poignant and fitting today, perhaps, than they were 35 years ago. We haven’t learned anything or internalized any aspect of them in the intervening 35 years. In fact, we are now closer to nuclear annihilation than we were when he first published The Pale Blue Dot.
Updated Image and Solar System Family Portrait
NASA said on February 12, 2020, that it has now updated the Pale Blue Dot image, using modern image-processing techniques and software. They explained:
… the Voyager project planned to shut off the Voyager 1 spacecraft’s imaging cameras to conserve power because the probe – along with its sibling Voyager 2 – would not fly close enough to any other objects to take pictures. Before the shutdown, the mission commanded the probe to take a series of 60 images designed to produce what they termed the Family Portrait of the Solar System. Executed on Valentine’s Day 1990, this sequence returned images for making color views of six of the solar system’s planets and also imaged the sun in monochrome.
The Great Equalizer
The Voyager 1 spacecraft, still operating and returning data from the near-interstellar environment beyond our solar system, was out near Saturn when it took this iconic image of our Pale Blue Dot 35 years ago. The fractional-pixel image of our tiny world may well turn out to be one of the most poignant and meaningful images of all time. Why? Because it shows our tiny, blue miracle of a planet as it really is, lost in a sunbeam, orbiting a small, ordinary star in the outer 1/3 of an equally ordinary spiral galaxy among the 100s of billions of other galaxies in the known universe. We, all 8 billion of us, are nowhere to be seen on this moat of dust lost in a sunbeam, yet we continue to fight war after war for our planet’s rapidly diminishing natural resources and land mass. The answer to Fermi’s Paradox may be closer than we think.
This image is the great equalizer.
Carl Sagan’s original Pale Blue Dot
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, 1994
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