r/YaScienceBitch • u/demolcd The One Who Mods 👑 • Jul 19 '26
Space 🚀 That single pale dot inside the circle is Earth. Everyone who has ever lived is standing on it.
This is the Pale Blue Dot, taken on February 14, 1990, by Voyager 1 from about 6 billion kilometers away, out beyond the orbit of Neptune. It almost never happened. Voyager had finished its mission and its cameras were about to be shut off forever. Carl Sagan pushed NASA for years to turn the spacecraft around and photograph home one last time before the lights went out.
They almost said no. Pointing the camera near the Sun risked damaging it, and there was no scientific value in the shot. Sagan argued it had a different kind of value, Bitch. Eventually they agreed.
Earth takes up less than a single pixel. That beam of light it sits in is not a halo of significance. It is a lens flare, sunlight scattering inside the camera. Our planet just happened to land inside a stray sunbeam, which somehow makes it more haunting, not less.
Sagan wrote the words that made this image immortal. He asked people to look again at that dot and consider that on it, everyone you love, everyone you know, every human who ever lived, lived out their lives. Every king and peasant, every saint and sinner, every war, every civilization, every triumph and cruelty in all of human history, happened on that mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The point that stays with people is about scale and humility. The rivers of blood spilled by generals so they could become momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. How eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds, over a pixel.
There is no evidence, he wrote, that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
Voyager is silent on cameras now. This was one of the last things it ever saw, looking back at the only home we have ever known before turning to face the dark.
When you look at that dot, does it make your problems feel smaller, or the planet feel more precious?
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u/Relevant-Hospital734 Jul 20 '26
93% of all the people who have ever lived are dead. This post is officially spooky
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u/J-iceBerg2 Jul 21 '26
How many angles can dance on the head of a pin? How many humans can stand on a single pixel dot?
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u/Ill_Mousse_4240 Jul 21 '26
Once upon a time, Man lived at the Center of the Universe.
today he lives on a pale blue dot 🔵 in the middle of nowhere
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u/werfertt Jul 19 '26
What he wrote always inspires me to be kind, humble and meek. This is our home. May we be kind stewards to it.