The Pale Blue Dot, Human Insignificance, and Optimism
By: Andrew Wheatcorft
Tags: Voyager 1, Space Exploration, Optimism, NASA

The Pale Blue Dot is a famous image taken on February 14, 1990 by the Voyager 1 space probe shortly before having its camera intentionally and indefinitely powered down for energy conservation puropses (https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/resources/536/voyager-1s-pale-blue-dot/). This image could be considered the last thing Voyager 1 saw before closing its eyes forever.

Anyone could look at this image and note how infinitesimally insignificant it makes everything about humanity seem. Famed astronomer Carl Sagan mused on this idea in his 1994 book Pale Blue Dot when he said:

“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. …

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.” (Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994, https://www.planetary.org/worlds/pale-blue-dot).

Indeed, as Sagan stated it is easy to look at this image and see how cosmologically diminuitive the entire Earth really is. All of collective human history resides on that barly noticable orb not even the size of a pixel in that image. Or does it?

While it is true under a certain framing that essentially all of human history resides within that image there is another, more optimistic view one could have. Voyager 1 captured an immensely vast swath of space in its final image, including the Earth itself, BUT Voyager 1did not capture itself.

Voyager 1 was launched on September 5, 1977, meaning that it took a journey of nearly 13 years before it photographed the Pale Blue Dot. A shining example of both human progress and enginuity such as Voyager 1 is certainly worthy of being considered an important part of history.

All of humankind rests within the image, but it is important to remember that just out of frame sits a feat of humanity that traveled more than 3.5 billion miles over an arduous journey of almost 13 years in order to photograph that image (https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/resources/536/voyager-1s-pale-blue-dot/).

Space is so incomparably vast that it can scarcely even be fractionally understood. But, in that void on a Pale Blue Dot resides a species that is rife with follies the likes of which is rivaled only by its thirst for knowledge and unrelenting persuit for answers. When humanity gazed into the limitless void of space it saw its insignificance and chose to rise up. Rather than be dissuaded by how little we knew humanity instead opted to do anything scientifically possible to reach out and discover new frontiers. The journey of Voyager 1 and the Pale Blue Dot image are not reflections of human insignificance. Instead, they are testiments to the tenacity of mankind and the human desire to reach out forever into the unknown.