The Pale Blue Dot — A Mind-blowing Picture That Started a Cognitive Shift

The universe is part of you. It’s asking questions through you, experiencing itself through you. You are the universe coming alive, thinking, feeling.

The Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of Earth taken Feb. 14, 1990, by NASA’s Voyager 1 at a distance of 3.7 billion miles (6 billion kilometers) from the Sun. The image inspired the title of scientist Carl Sagan’s book, “Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space/Photo courtesy of NASA

The faint blue dot in the photo above is earth.

A mere speck suspended in an infinite, inky blackness. Taken by Voyager 1 in 1990 from an unprecedented distance of approximately 6 billion kilometers.

Mind-blowing, right?

Carl Sagan called it the“The Pale Blue Dot.”

It’s a cognitive shift for me.

Look at that dot, suspended in space.

The pale blue dot reminds me to look beyond myself, to see the bigger picture in almost everything. A single point of blue is all it takes to see beyond the tiny details. It’s about your place and part of something magical. Take the view from above and everything changes.

Sagan makes a good argument for putting things into perspective:

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…