Friday Perspective

Anybody who knows me knows that I am an amateur astronomer and an all-around "space buff."

One space project that has always held a special place in my heart has been the Voyager 1 and 2 space probes. Both of these probes are now past the termination shock and traveling through the heliosheath at about 1 million miles per day, eventually to pass beyond the last boundary of our solar system and into interstellar space. The technology on these spacecraft, which was cutting-edge back when they were launched in 1977, would now be outdated museum curiosities.

As part of Voyager 1's mission, Carl Sagan suggested that the probe take one last photo of our solar system as a whole. On February 14th, 1990, as the spacecraft left our planetary neighborhood for the fringes of the solar system, engineers turned Voyager 1 around for one last look at its home planet... a last Valentine's Day card to Earth. Voyager 1 was about 6.4 billion kilometers (4 billion miles) away, and approximately 32 degrees above the ecliptic plane, when it captured this portrait of our world. Caught in the center of scattered light rays (a result of taking the picture so close to the Sun), Earth appears as a tiny point of light, a crescent only 0.12 pixel in size.

Carl Sagan wrote about this and other aspects of the Voyager missions in A Pale Blue Dot. It's something that can really put things in perspective. Here it is in video form, and in text below. It's a poignant reminder that we are all brothers and sisters sharing the ride on this big blue marble.



From A 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

Happy Friday, everybody.