![]() ![]() ![]() 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.Īlthough the “Pale Blue Dot” may have looked static, in 1990, the planet, of course, was as alive and bustling as ever. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. And that was the point: In his 1994 book, Pale Blue Dot, famed scientist Carl Sagan, whose idea it was to capture Earth from such an immense distance, famously described the image in a way that never fails to make me tear up: In the image, the Earth is about a pixel wide, a minuscule fleck in a grainy sea of nothingness. I’d won a print of the photo, appropriately, in a science fair competition. The first time I can remember seeing “Pale Blue Dot” was in high school. ![]() It was, in its most basic form, an act of love. It’s fitting that “ Pale Blue Dot” was taken on Valentine’s Day. On Valentine’s Day, 1990-34 years ago today-it looked back and snapped an image of Earth, the so-called “ Pale Blue Dot,” which remains one of science’s most iconic photos, and, in my view, one of the greatest photos ever taken in the history of the world. Within two years, it made it to Jupiter, and almost two years after that, Saturn. After about two months, it passed Mars’ orbit. On September 5, 1977, a 1,800-pound, ladle-shaped spacecraft named Voyager 1 took off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, bound for the edge of our solar system. Mother Jones illustration Getty NASA/JPL-Caltech ![]()
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