The Voyager 2 space probe left earth 49 years ago – on August 20, 1977. It’s twin sister, Voyager 1, left just a few weeks later, on September 5. They were built to last only 5 years – long enough to observe Jupiter and Saturn and their rings, but went on to observe Uranus and Neptune and to transmit information back to earth. Our understandings of these outer planets – and of the solar system – have been forever changed by the images they took. The probes have defied all expectations of longevity.
Both Voyagers have now left our solar system and are traveling in interstellar space, but miraculously, scientists on earth are still in touch with them. It takes approximately 23 hours for a command to reach Voyager 1 now, and 19 ½ hours to reach Voyager 2. They are each traveling at over 30,000 miles an hour. On November 18, 2026, Voyager 1 will be one light-day away from Earth – the distance a particle of light can travel in 24 hours, or about 16 billion miles. Voyager 2 will reach that milestone in 2035.
In 1990, the when Voyager 1 went beyond the orbit of Pluto, it turned around and took a picture of earth – a selfie before there were selfies!
That photo, in which the whole earth appears as a pale blue dot, was memorialized by Carl Sagan. He puts our conflicts, – both large and small – in a totally different perspective. I thought I’d share it with you today.
From this distant vantage point, the earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider again 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 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.
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
Sources:
Carl Sagan – https://carlsagan.com/
New York Times – https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/18/science/nasa-voyagers-big-bang.html
NASA – https://science.nasa.gov/mission/voyager/fact-sheet/
The Planetary Society – https://www.planetary.org/worlds/pale-blue-dot