On Valentine’s Day 39 years ago, Nasa released an incredible image showing Earth as a ‘Pale Blue Dot’ against the cold, massive expanse of space.
Now it’s published a new version of this photo in which Earth is seen ‘as a single, bright blue pixel’.
The first snap was taken on February 14, 1990, by the Voyager 1 space probe just before its cameras were intentionally turned off to conserve power and prepare for its lonely journey away from the sun and out towards the edge of our solar system.
Nasa’s new image uses image-processing software to offer a cleaned-up and sharper view from Voyager’s perspective as it snapped the epic photo.
This celebrated Voyager 1 view was part of a series of 60 images dubbed a ‘Family Portrait of the Solar System’.
The name of this iconic image was dreamed up by legendary space scientist Carl Sagan, who published a book with the same title in 1994.
Commenting on the photo, Sagan wrote: ‘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.P
‘The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
‘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.’
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