The pale blue dot 35 years later

“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… on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” 

Carl Sagan, PhD, wrote these words about one of the most famous planetary self-portraits ever taken. The pale blue dot, as the image came to be known, was captured by NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft 35 years ago, on Feb. 14, 1990. The probe was more than 6 billion kilometers (4 billion miles) away from Earth, having completed its flybys of Jupiter and Saturn. Earth is seen as a tiny point of light caught in the center of one of the scattered light rays resulting from taking the image so close to the Sun. This image was one of the last that Voyager 1 took before powering down its cameras forever to save energy for the rest of its extended mission.

The photo was taken at the suggestion of Sagan, a Planetary Society co-founder who was a member of the Voyager imaging team at the time. He knew that at such a huge distance, Earth would barely show up in the image. But that was the point — to show Earth in the context of the vastness of space to underscore how tiny and fragile our planet really is. 

“There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world,” Sagan later wrote about the image. “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.” 

For some people, the pale blue dot’s depiction of Earth alone in the vast emptiness of space makes our planet seem insignificant. We’re all just floating through the Universe on a relatively tiny rock, inconceivably far from even our closest neighbors — let alone any other living things. It can be seen as a tremendously lonely image.

But it also conveys how special our planet is. As a world that is home to living beings, including conscious ones, Earth is extraordinarily special. We may be floating out here in relative isolation, but we are far from insignificant. 

The pale blue dot also speaks to the need to explore. We know that the Universe is vast and largely empty. But we also know that amid all that emptiness, there are billions of worlds like ours — whether that means planets similar to our own or vastly different places that share our most important quality: life. 

We are almost certainly not alone in the Cosmos, but only by exploring can we find out for sure. And along the way, we’ll discover amazing things.