Thirty six years ago, on this day, February 14th, 1990,
“The command sequence was then compiled and sent to Voyager 1, with the images taken at 04:48 GMT on February 14, 1990.[19] At that time, the distance between the spacecraft and Earth was 40.47 astronomical units (6,055 million kilometers, 3,762 million miles).[20]”
From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider again 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.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 356ppm. As of 2025 it is 426ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that Voyager had been launched years earlier, and they turned round and looked at the earth and took the photo. There’s a nice story about how it got found, just like one pixel.
What I think we can learn from this is that beautiful images are sometimes found by accident. See also Earthrise in 1968 as pushed for by Stewart Brand.
What happened next Carl Sagan wrote his wonderful essay about the pale blue dot and everything that happened there. Sagan had given testimony to a Senate committee in December 1985 about the greenhouse effect. And Sagan sadly died too young.
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.
Also on this day:
February 14,1967 – John Mason (Met Office boss) dismisses carbon dioxide problem
