This picture isn't very pretty. It's grainy and doesn't contain anything with sharp definition. Its content wouldn't make a good Michael Bay blow'em up showcase or a very good movie at all. Despite all of this, I find this picture to be one of the most profound ever snapped.
In February of 1990, the Voyager 1 spacecraft (V'ger, for all you Trekies) was nearing the edge of our solar system. With its primary science missions completed, Carl Sagan urged NASA to turn Voyager 1 around and snap a picture of the Earth from 3.7 billion miles away (6 billion kilometers).
You can see Earth in this picture by following the brownish band of color on the right down about halfway to a tiny blue dot. Sagan called this a "Pale Blue Dot" and wrote a book about it with the same name. Why do I consider this picture profound? Sagan answers this question eloquently:
Consider again 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.
Interestingly enough, one of the technicians that designed the command sequence to turn Voyager 1 around and snap the picture was Carolyn Porco of the University of Arizona. You've probably seen Carolyn on History Channel's Universe among other things.
Pretty neat, eh? ;)
No comments:
Post a Comment