The Pale Blue Dot

The Pale Blue Dot

Contributed by Michael Hannah

For the funeral of an astronautical engineer, we chose a short paragraph written by astronomer and author Carl Sagan from his book Pale Blue Dot. The title refers to an image taken by the Voyager 1 space probe in 1990. The probe was sent to explore the outer reaches of the solar system but at one point the camera was turned back on us, on our world. And from a distance of some 6 billion km, the earth appears on this image as no more than a single pixel. (Visible – just – in the image to the right.)

A pale blue dot.

Sagan writes:

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.