On Valentine’s Day 36 years ago (1990), Carl Sagan requested NASA to turn Voyager 1's camera back toward home for one last look.
From 3.7 billion miles away, Voyager captured this image.
Here is how Carl Sagan described it:
“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 Edward Sagan (9 November 1934 – 20 December 1996) was an American astronomer, planetary scientist and science communicator.
Initially an assistant professor at Harvard, Sagan later moved to Cornell, where he was the David Duncan Professor of Astronomy and Space Sciences and directed the Laboratory for Planetary Studies.
He played an active role in the Mariner, Viking and Voyager programs.
He published more than 600 scientific papers and articles and several popular science books, starting with "The Cosmic Connection."
He won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for "The Dragons of Eden."
Voyager 1 is a space probe launched by NASA on 5 September 1977, as part of the Voyager program to study the outer Solar System and the interstellar space beyond the Sun's heliosphere.
It was launched 16 days after its twin, Voyager 2.
It communicates through the NASA Deep Space Network (DSN) to receive routine commands and to transmit data to Earth.
