SCIENCE
What is the ‘Pale Blue Dot’? 34 years ago we caught a glimpse from 3.7 billion miles
The famous image was captured by Voyager 1 and both its significance and insignificance echoed by Carl Sagan.
The photograph “Pale Blue Dot” has become one of the most iconic images of our planet, a tiny speck lost in the darkness of outer space. Taken in 1990 by the Voyager 1 spacecraft, this photograph is a mosaic of 60 images which the Voyager team referred to as the first “Family Portrait” of our solar system.
There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world.
Our Earth: just a pale blue dot
The initiative to pivot the spacecraft’s camera and capture this historic image later became the focal point of the work of astronomer and science communicator Carl Sagan in his book, “Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space.”
Voyager captured Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter, Earth, and Venus. Some were unable to be photographed: Mars was obscured by scattered sunlight bouncing into the camera, Mercury was too close to the Sun, and the dwarf planet Pluto was too small, distant, and dark to be detected.
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 image reveals Earth as this tiny blue dot, barely visible amidst the vastness of deep space. The bands of light seen are a photographic artifact, but the significance of this photograph transcends the technical to offer profound reflection on our place in the universe.
The photograph of the “Pale Blue Dot” teaches us of our own insignificance in the universe and invites us to contemplate the fragility and uniqueness of our planet in the cosmos. Through it, Sagan reminds us that every human being who has ever lived, every moment of joy and sorrow, every achievement and failure of our history, has occurred on this small speck suspended in a sunbeam.
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.
Voyager 1 remains unique. It is the first and only spacecraft to have attempted (and succeeded) in photographing our solar system. This spacecraft was so far from Earth that it took several passes of communication with NASA’s Deep Space Network, over a couple of months, to transmit all the data. The last image data was downloaded on Earth on May 1, 1990.