February 14, 1990 • 3.7 billion miles from Earth
One Pixel Is Different
In a vast ocean of darkness, a single point of light contains everything we love.
February 14, 1990 • 3.7 billion miles from Earth
In a vast ocean of darkness, a single point of light contains everything we love.
"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, has ever lived, lived their lives. The totality 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."From "Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space" (1997)
— Carl Sagan
On the last day of 1990, NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft took a series of images looking back towards Earth. At a distance of 6 billion miles, it was the first time humanity had seen our planet from such a vast perspective.
Carl Sagan, who had suggested the idea of the look-back photos to NASA, proposed that Voyager take some pictures of the solar system. The resulting image shows Earth as a mere speck of light—what Sagan called "a pale blue dot"—lost in a vast sunbeam.
That single pixel contains everything. Every mountain, every ocean, every city, every person. Our entire history, our future, and our very existence—all contained in one tiny point of light in the cosmic dark.
In the grand canvas of the universe, we are both insignificant and profoundly significant.
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