Sagan began researching the origins of life in the 1950s and went on to play a leading role in every major
U.S. spacecraft expedition to the planets.
"We have looked close-up at dozens of new worlds. Worlds we never saw before. And unless we are so stupid to destroy ourselves, we are going to be moving out to space in the next century," he said. "And if I'm fortunate enough to have played a part in the first preliminary reconnaissance in the solar system, that's a terrifically exciting thing."
The photo above was taken by Voyager 1 in 1990 as it sailed away from Earth, more than 4 billion miles
in the distance. Having completed its primary mission, Voyager at that time was on its way out of the
Solar System, on a trajectory of approximately 32 degrees above the plane of the Solar System.
Ground Control issued commands for the distant space craft to turn around and, looking back,
take photos of each of the planets it had visited. From Voyager's vast distance, the Earth was captured
as a infinitesimal point of light (between the two white tick marks), actually smaller than a single pixel
of the photo. The image was taken with a narrow angle camera lens, with the Sun quite close to the field
of view. Quite by accident, the Earth was captured in one of the scattered light rays caused by taking the
image at an angle so close to the Sun.
Below is a video of Carl Sagan reading from his book "The Pale Blue Dot" and also a transcript of part of it below that.
"From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest,but for us, it's different.
Consider again 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 lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings,
thousands of confident religions,
ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and
destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child,
every mother and father, every 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."
"The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all
those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of
a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot
on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their
misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings,
our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe,
are challenged by this point of pale light."
"Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity ...
in all this vastness ... there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building
experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits
than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more
kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot,
the only home we've ever known."
