Images that changed the world: Pale Blue Dot

At a first glance the image looks insignificant, a photo that was perhaps taken with a finger over the lens or maybe taken at night with no flash on. The resolution is grainy and four diagonal bands of light, like the refraction of light causing a rainbow, extend down from the top right to the bottom left. The only really outstanding bit of the picture is a pale blue dot, nothing but a pimple, which sits to the lower centre right, caught up in one of the bands.

You are asked to consider the image again, more attentively this time and you oblige. Your opinion doesn’t change, there’s nothing there but an insignificant crumb.

But it's more than that.

It's Earth.

That small pimple speck of sand decimal point is home. It’s you and me.

The picture was taken on February 14th 1990…Valentine's Day. Voyager 1, a spacecraft that had ventured four billion miles out into space, was on its way out of the solar system when engineers, at the request of the astronomer Carl Sagan, decided to turn it around one last time to see what it could capture.

The fragility of life was exposed so innocently. Here was out great, big planet, reduced to something so radically different.
As such, that seemingly empty image is anything but. It is, and will always be, one of the most powerful photographs to have ever been taken.

Humanity had never seen anything like it before. Of course, we knew that the earth was like a grain of sand against the bigger picture of space, but we had never seen it.

It was an intimate portrait of our planet Earth, vulnerable, a lonely soul in the great expanse of the universe, living as best as it can.

That picture, of the pale blue dot, is a heartbreaker, an eye-opener, and a philosophical point of inquiry. It moved Sagan, inspiring him to write one of the most moving passages any person has composed. The following is an extract:

"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."

With a supreme eloquence, Sagan transformed that picture into a powerful statement of hope. Yes humanity has wrecked havoc, constructed strange ideologies, chopped and sliced into landscapes to fuel furnaces that create objects and instruments and services to keep us busy, but look at the beauty we’re capable of.

It almost renders the impossibilities of our lives obsolete and stops us in our stride. That image reminds us of our own fragility in an equally expansive world that is, in itself, vast beyond our belief. Every time you take a long train journey and pass mile after mile of land, think how great a distance it really is from one station to another station.

The image once again reminds us, as Sagan goes onto say, that as far as we know it, earth is the only planet that we know for sure to be capable of harbouring life.

That pale blue insignificant dot is our story and it is unique.