The Pale Blue Dot

HKW — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 04:00:02 +0000

Perspective is an amazing thing. The Pale Blue Dot illustrates this.

The Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of planet Earth taken in 1990 by Voyager 1. I saw it for the first time today. The image show planet earth against the vastness of space. The image was taken by request of Carl Sagan after Voyager 1 completed it’s primary mission and was leaving the Solar System. They turned the camera around to take a photo of Earth, across a great expanse of space and here’s what he said:

“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.

Hong Kong Wong » pale blue dot photo

The Pale Blue Dot

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