15-03-2008 The Pale Blue Dot (Article 128)

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Simon Kenny
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15-03-2008 The Pale Blue Dot (Article 128)

Post by Simon Kenny » Fri Jan 02, 2009 4:33 pm

The Pale Blue Dot (Article 128)

The image with this article does not look much until you think about just what it is. It is famously called ‘The Pale Blue dot’ and is a photo of Earth (in the centre of the blue circle) set against the vastness of space taken by Voyager 1 from a record distance. Voyager 1, launched in Sept. 1977 — is a robotic space probe of the outer Solar System and beyond. On Valentine’s Day in 1990 NASA commanded the Voyager spacecraft to turn around and photograph the planets of our Solar System, having completed its primary mission. Voyager 1 was 4 billion miles from Earth and NASA says that Earth’s size is about 0.12 pixels in this image! Carl Sagan had pushed for Voyager 1 to take this series of pictures and the ‘sunbeam’ you see is due to the effect of sunlight on the camera’s optics.

. It inspired a book by Carl Sagan (1934 — 1996) who was an American astronomer and astrochemist and well known for writing popular science books. Some readers may remember him as co-writer and presenter of the highly acclaimed and very successful 1980 TV series called Cosmos.

Carl Sagan related his thoughts on the deeper meaning of this image as follows:

“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 harbour 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.”

Al Gore’s 2006 documentary film ''An Inconvenient Truth'' featured the "Pale Blue Dot" photo at the end. Gore used it in his slide show to underline the need to stop global warming.

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