A Pale Blue Dot (Carl Sagan)

Just lately, before I go to sleep at night, I've been reading a book called 'How Is It Done?'. As an endlessly curious person who always wants to know everything about everything, this book is fascinating. It covers hundreds of different subjects from how they built the pyramids to how people survive being hit by a bolt of lightning!

The other night, I found myself reading the section on space travel. I was reading about Voyager 1, the robotic space probe launched in 1977. This interested me, and so the other evening I was speaking to Leon about what I had read, and we had a long discussion about Space and The Universe. Leon (being the Space-freak that he is!) sent a link via email that took me through to a page on the Pale Blue Dot.

In 1990, as Voyager 1 was leaving the Solar System, it was instructed to turn it's camera around and take a photograph of the Earth, from a distance of 3.7 billion miles (6 billion kilometres). The resulting image is now known as the Pale Blue Dot. As you can see in the images below, when viewed from such a great distance out in the vastness of Space, our planet is nothing more than a speck hanging there alone in the darkness.

The astronomer and astrophysicist Carl Sagan used this image in a lecture he gave at Cornell University in the United States in 1994. I found his speech very moving and thought-provoking, and so I decided to read an excerpt to you. I hope that, combined with the wonderful images below, it will make you stop and think - and appreciate this wonderful planet - too.

To listen to the audio file below, please hover your cursor over the 'play' arrow at the start (this will show up when you hover). This piece was recorded via Skype - even so, I think we did quite well in terms of sound quality! A big thank you to Leon Milo for recording this for me.

Blue_dot

The tiny speck of light you can see halfway down the brown band on the right is Planet Earth.

(Photo: Voyager 1, 1990)

A slightly enlarged section of the original image, with a blue ring indicating The Earth.

Comments

[bd]

Very nice. Enjoyed the reading.

[Leon Milo]

It is a beautiful and powerful speech. Sagan was, and still is, such an inspiration. He invites us to marvel at the wonders and beauty of science, to respect each other and to value the joy of thoughtful imagination.

It is so great that you had the idea of reading this aloud. Your voice, losing just a little bit of its richness due to Skype audio, sounds gorgeous.
xx {O}

[cathie Joy]

Beautifully done Natty.
I think you will find this interesting if you have not heard it already. Carl Sagan's mixed tape to the universe and his wonderful relationship with his wife Ann Druyan.
http://www.npr.org/templates/player/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=123534818&m=123635564

[Nancie Mills Pipgras]

Brilliant post from concept to execution. Just brilliant. Thank you.

[details and design]

I love Carl Sagan. One of the most important people in the 20th Century. Thank you for posting this!

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Throughout recorded history, several cosmologies and cosmogonies have been proposed to account for observations of the Universe. The earliest quantitative geocentric models were developed by the ancient Greeks, who proposed that the Universe possesses infinite space and has existed eternally, but contains a single set of concentric spheres of finite size – corresponding to the fixed stars, the Sun and various planets – rotating about a spherical but unmoving Earth. Over the centuries, more precise observations and improved theories of gravity led to Copernicus's heliocentric model and the Newtonian model of the Solar System, respectively. Further improvements in astronomy led to the realization that the Solar System is embedded in a galaxy composed of millions of stars, the Milky Way, and that other galaxies exist outside it, as far as astronomical instruments can reach.

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