Happy Earth Day:

Earth, caught in a ray of light; Image credit: Voyager 1/NASA

The image was taken by Voyager 1 at the suggestion of Carl Sagan on 14 February 1990.  At the time, Voyager 1 was 4 billion miles away from its home planet.  As the spacecraft was approaching the fringe of our solar system, engineers turned it around for one final glimpse at Earth.

Artist rendering of Voyager 1; Credit: NASA

‘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.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. 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 with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.’

— Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994