Carl Sagan · The Pale Blue Dot
How do we look from out there?
That time, that place
Voyager 1, launched in 1977, had passed Jupiter and Saturn and was heading out of the solar system. By 1990 it was six billion kilometres away.
The camera had no more work to do. It was about to be switched off.
Why this question
Sagan asked that the camera be turned around for one picture of Earth.
There was resistance inside NASA: no scientific value, and pointing the camera near the Sun risked the instrument. At that distance Earth would be a single dot.
Sagan's argument was not scientific. It was that seeing that dot would do something to people.
What was found
The picture came back. Earth was smaller than a pixel, caught inside a band of sunlight scattered in the lens.
Sagan's essay on it is the Pale Blue Dot. Its point: everything in history happened on that speck. Every king and farmer, every lover and parent, every saint and sinner lived on that mote of dust. Consider the slaughter over a fraction of a dot.
He made carrying science to the public his life's work. Cosmos aired in sixty countries, and people still name him as the reason they began.
What this atlas is trying to do belongs to that lineage.
Space images were taken for scientific purposes only
Earth photographed from six billion kilometres, smaller than one pixel
The question of what science is for became a public one