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Relax Everybody — We’re Living on a Speck of Dust Floating in Space
The photo above was taken from Voyager 1 at a distance of 3.7 billion miles, making it far and away the most distant image of Earth ever taken. Can you see little old earth? It’s the tiny dot about half way down and to the right, in the middle of the brown vertical band (the bands are the result of sunlight reflecting off the camera). Launched in 1977, Voyager 1’s chief objectives were to study Jupiter and Saturn. In 1990, ten years after completing this primary mission, the famed astronomer Carl Sagan convinced NASA to turn the probe’s cameras around and take one last photo of Earth from deep space.
The resultant photo provides a valuable reminder of how mind-blowingly infinitesimal our world is, a tiny dot in a vast ocean of blackness. As Sagan said about the dot in the photo: “That’s home. That’s us. On it, 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…
