On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.

Studying that photo and ruminating of its meaning, Carl Sagan was inspired to say : The photo was named the “Pale Blue Dot” because it showed the Earth as an insignificant point of light amidst the black vastness of part of the universe. A few years before, on February 14, 1990, the noted astronomer and author Carl Sagan convinced NASA to turn the camera located on the space probe Voyager back toward the Earth to take a photograph as the spacecraft was leaving our solar system 3.7 billion miles (6 billion km) from the sun. I don’t want to lose it.”Īnd he shouldn’t lose his appreciation for the treasure that we have here in our home planet of Earth. In an instant you go, ‘whoa, that’s death.’ That’s what I saw.” Then he added, “I hope that I can maintain what I feel right now. The covering of blue, this sheath, this blanket, this comforter of blue that we have around, we say, ‘oh, that’s blue sky,’ and then you shoot through it all, and you’re looking into blackness, into black ugliness. Everybody in the world needs to see… to see the blue color whip by, and now you’re staring into the blackness, that’s the thing. He said that he was struck by the vulnerability of the Earth and the relative sliver of the atmosphere. From his elevated vantage point, he was able to see how really thin the Earth’s atmosphere is and he could catch a glimpse of the dark enormity of the rest of the surrounding universe. He experienced about 3 minutes of weightlessness and was able to observe the Earth from a perspective few have had the privilege to undergo. On October 13, 2021, Star Trek’s Captain James Tiberius Kirk, in the guise of 90-year-old actor William Shatner, rode aboard a Blue Origin rocket ship 67 miles to the edge of space.

The pale blue dot