What can a photo taken 3.7 billion miles from Earth teach us about our place in the universe?
Subject: Discovery/Exploration - The Pale Blue Dot
Event: NASA’s Voyager 1 probe launched, 1977
The brain is like a muscle. When it is in use we feel very good. Understanding is joyous. -Carl Sagan
On September 5, 1977, a message in a bottle was cast into the cosmic ocean when the NASA Voyager 1 probe was launched. Its initial mission was to explore the outer solar system, including Jupiter and Saturn.
The year 1977 also happened to be the 100th anniversary of Thomas Edison’s invention of the phonograph. It was especially appropriate, therefore, that astronomer Carl Sagan headed a project to produce a golden phonograph record that would travel with Voyager. The recording included greetings in 59 human languages, whale songs, the sound of a baby crying, and an EEG. Also included were 90 minutes of musical recordings from an array of musical artists, including Mozart, Stravinsky, Louis Armstrong, and Chuck Berry. The following words from President Jimmy Carter were also included on the record:
This is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts, and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so that we may live into yours. We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations.
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The goal of Voyager was primarily educational, to determine whether or not there is intelligence elsewhere in the universe and to humbly seek out knowledge of other planets, knowledge that might help us understand our own planet better. As stated by Carl Sagan, “Well, we are profoundly ignorant of what the other planets are about. And that ignorance carries over to our own planet. It’s very difficult to understand your own planet until you’ve looked at a few others so you have something to compare it to” (1).
Thirteen years after Voyager’s launch, on February 14, 1990, NASA received a profound lesson from Voyager’s camera, a Valentine sent back to Earth, traveling farther than any Valentine in history.
As Voyager reached the edges of the solar system, NASA engineers prepared to shut down its cameras in order to conserve the spacecraft’s power. Before doing this, however, they directed Voyager to turn 180 degrees and snap a photo of Earth. The image, which became known as the “Pale Blue Dot,” featured three beams of light; inside the third beam is a tiny speck of light, so small that most people need help to see it.
It’s ironic that it’s this “Pale Blue Dot” that serves as Voyager’s greatest discovery. Sent to reconnoiter our solar system and explore other planets, Voyager’s last look back home provided us with a new perspective, seeing Earth from 7.6 billion miles away. The picture arrived back on Earth with no caption, but Carl Sagan soon provided one:
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. (2)
Recall, Retrieve, Recite, Ruminate, Reflect, Reason: How did the primary mission of Voyager contrast with the circumstances of the taking of the Pale Blue Dot photo?
Challenge - Time-Space Capsule: Imagine that you were tasked with selecting one small object that would be placed in Voyager along with the Golden Record. What would be the one object you would select, and why do you think it would be an appropriate representation of the human species?
Also On This Day:
September 5, 1952: Today is the birthday of children’s author and poet Paul Fleishman. Before he became a full-time writer, he worked as a bookstore clerk, library shelver, and proofreader. His work as a proofreader led to the founding of two grammar watchdog groups: ColonWatch and The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to English. Fleishman won the most prestigious award in children’s literature in 1989, the Newbery Medal, for his book Joyful Noise: Poems for Two Voices. In Joyful Noise, Fleishman popularized a new poetic genre, the poem for two voices. Written to be read aloud by two people, each poem is written in two columns. Each reader is assigned a single column, and the two readers alternate, reading the lines in turn from the top to the bottom of the page. Readers join their voices whenever words are written on the same line in both columns (3).
Sources:
1-History of Information. “Launching "Messages in a Bottle" into the Cosmic Ocean.”
2-Koren, Marina. “The Power of the ‘Pale Blue Dot’ Three Decades Later.” The Atlantic 14 Feb. 2020.
3-http://www.paulfleischman.net/events.htm.
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