Phronesis
No. 090Event14 February 1990Space ·Science ·Philosophy

The Pale Blue Dot

In 1990, from about 6 billion kilometres away, Voyager 1 turned around and photographed Earth. We take up less than a pixel.

2 min read

By 1990, Voyager 1 had finished its tour of the planets and was leaving the solar system. Its cameras would soon be turned off for good to save power.

Carl Sagan, who worked on the imaging team, had argued for years for one last picture: turn around and photograph home. There was resistance. The image had no scientific value, and pointing the camera close to the Sun risked damaging it. On 14 February 1990 the spacecraft took a series of 60 frames forming a “Family Portrait” of the solar system.

In one frame, Earth appears as a bluish-white speck occupying about 0.12 of a pixel, sitting by chance in a streak of scattered sunlight.

What Sagan made of it

In his 1994 book Sagan wrote that everyone you love, everyone you have ever heard of, “every king and peasant… every saint and sinner” lived “on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”

The passage is often quoted as an argument for humility and for taking care of each other: there is nowhere else, at least for now, to go.

Astronauts describe a related shift in perspective after seeing Earth from orbit, called the overview effect. Most of us will only ever get it second-hand, through images like this one.

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us.”
Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot (1994)

Bring it up

“The famous photo of Earth from Voyager 1 almost didn’t happen. Some at NASA worried it could damage the camera by pointing it near the Sun.”

Follow the thread

  1. RelatedThe first human in space took off from Kazakhstan The space age that began on the Kazakh steppe led to the first photographs of Earth from deep space.
  2. In contrastYou can’t see the Great Wall from the Moon From far enough away, nothing human is visible at all.
  3. RelatedThe mixtape we sent to the stars The same spacecraft carries a record meant to introduce humanity to whoever finds it.
  4. RelatedPoint Nemo, where spacecraft go to die Both change your sense of scale: one looks at Earth from space, the other at the place on Earth farthest from anyone.
  5. RelatedWhy the sky is blue, and not violet The same scattering is why Earth looks blue from space.

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