A ‘simple’ yet one of the most power images is the one called–The Pale Blue Dot. It’s a photo of Earth taken by the Voyager 1 NASA spacecraft in the year 1990 from a distance of about 6 billion km from Earth on the borders of our solar system. In this image the Earth is just a tiny dot of some 0.12 pixel in dimension. The man behind the image was Carl Sagan, who later published the image in his book Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, a very interesting book to read.


The tiny dot on the right is the planet Earth | IMAGE SOURCE: NASA (Creative Commons)


The wide-angle photograph of the Sun and inner planets (not visible), with Pale Blue Dot superimposed on the left, Venus to its right | IMAGE SOURCE: NASA (Creative Commons)

The image is not complete without the quote from same book, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space by Carl Sagan, From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. 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.


You can find the full article by Carl Sagan published in the Parade Magazine in September, 1990 after this photo was taken.

Something that is amazing to note is that the Voyager 1 spacecraft traveling at the speed of 64,000 km/h took 12 years to reach just the boundary of our solar system. But our solar system might be just one set of planets revolving around a bright star like our sun and there might be billions of solar systems just within our galaxy and billions of galaxies in an infinite space!
If you think about it, our planet is just a tiny water droplet in an ocean of which we still don’t know the boundaries. Moreover life as we know it is so fragile and we are physiologically very much limited when we try venturing into space… Just a thought.

References:
[1] Sagan, Carl (1994), Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space. Random House, New York.
[2] The Earth from the frontiers of the Solar system – The Pale, Blue Dot, PARADE Magazine, September 9th 1990; Retrieved December 12, 2011.