Thirty-five years have passed since NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft captured the iconic "Pale Blue Dot" image, prompting humanity to reflect on its place in the cosmos.
On February 14, 1990, Voyager 1 turned its camera 180 degrees and snapped a view of Earth from a distance of 3.7 billion miles (6 billion kilometers), resulting in the image known as the "Pale Blue Dot," which changed the way humanity perceives Earth, according to NASA. At that moment, Earth appeared as a barely visible point in the image, less than one pixel—0.12 pixels.
Carl Sagan, the astronomer, author, and science communicator best known for the award-winning TV series "Cosmos: A Personal Voyage," was instrumental in capturing the photograph. He proposed the idea to take the photograph and was in charge of the images, according to Live Science. Initially, NASA engineers argued against taking the photograph because, at such a vast distance, it was likely that nothing would be visible. However, Sagan persisted and eventually convinced the engineers to proceed.
"Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us," wrote Sagan in his book "Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space" (1994). Sagan emphasized the responsibility to treat the rest of the universe more kindly and to preserve and protect the pale blue dot, "the only home we've ever known," while also calling for humanity to take care of each other and the planet.
The photograph taken by Voyager 1 was part of a series of 60 images collectively referred to as the "Family Portrait of the Solar System," according to NASA. The sequence included the Sun and the planets Venus, Earth, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, but only six planets were visible due to positioning or camera limitations. Thirty-four minutes after capturing the image, the cameras of Voyager 1 were permanently turned off to conserve power.
Voyager 1, the most distant spacecraft from Earth, remains operational alongside its twin, Voyager 2, and both are operated by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, according to NASA. Voyager 1 is now 25 billion kilometers from Earth, four times farther than at the time the photograph was taken. The spacecraft is still transmitting scientific data from interstellar space, although it occasionally encounters technical problems.
As a member of the Voyager project team, Sagan helped develop the Golden Record placed on the Voyager spacecraft, which carries sounds and images depicting life and culture on Earth, serving as a message of peace to any hypothetical extraterrestrials that may one day encounter it.
In his book, Sagan wrote: "The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand," as reported by IFLScience.
The "Pale Blue Dot" image became one of the most iconic images ever taken and was later voted as one of the ten best scientific images of space. The photograph and the book by Sagan that it inspired became an iconic image of the fragility and uniqueness of humanity's place in the cosmos.
This article was written in collaboration with generative AI company Alchemiq