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On Valentine ’s Day 1990,NASA’sVoyager 1 spacecraftsnapped what would become one of the most iconic images ever get : a view of Earth from 3.7 billion miles ( 6 billion kilometers ) forth . In that moment , all of humanity was captured in a ghostly fragment of a pixel swim through an stern sea of darkness — a " Pale Blue Dot " lost in a void .
Carl Sagan — the uranologist , writer , and skill communicator best know for the award - winning idiot box series " Cosmos : A Personal Voyage " — is one of the grounds this photograph be .
The “Pale Blue Dot,” a photo of our home planet taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft on Feb. 14, 1990, when it was almost 4 billion miles (6.4 billion kilometers) from Earth.
As a phallus of the Voyager team , Sagan helped developthe Golden Recordsthat bait aboard the twin Voyager probe , carrying emblematic case of human culture and substance of serenity to any hypothetical aliens that may one day happen them . And play along the launch of the Voyager 1 investigation in 1977 , Sagan also suggested that the spacecraft snatch up a picture of Earth on its journey to the outersolar system .
Capturing the image take a decennium of provision , according toThe Planetary Society , and overcame risks to the spacecraft ’s sensitive cameras and layoff of vital personnel office . But after Voyager 1 finally snapped the photograph from beyond the orbit of Neptune , it stored the image on its tape recorder and slow beam the info back to Earth ’s radio telescopes , pixel by pixel , over the path of three month , according toa newspaper publisher articleSagan wrote for the Prescott Courier ( now called the Daily Courier ) in 1990 .
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An uncropped version of the “Pale Blue Dot” photo. Earth is the bright pixel shining within the right-most sunbeam.
Writing in his bookPale Blue Dot(1994 ) , Sagan ’s renowned description of the picture is just as relevant and powerful today as it was decades ago .
" Look again at that battery-acid . That ’s here . That ’s home . That ’s us,“Sagan wrote . " On it everyone you fuck , everyone you know , everyone you ever heard of , every human being who ever was , lived out their lives . "
" Every hunter and forager , every zep and coward , every creator and destroyer of civilisation , every king and peasant , every untested couple in love , every mother and father , promising child , inventor and IE , every teacher of moral , every tainted politician , every ' superstar , ' every ' sovereign leader , ' every holy person and sinner in the history of our metal money lived there — on a atom of debris suspend in a sunbeam . "
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Thirty - five years later , much has changed for Earth , and for the Voyager probes . Voyager 1 is over 15.5 billion miles ( 25 billion km ) from Earth — four times further than it was when that photograph was taken , and it ’s still transmitting science data back to us from interstellar distance ( despite some occasionaltechnical difficulties ) .
alas , interstellar outer space has proven to be a chip empty , so it await like Voyager 1 will be spending Valentine ’s Day alone yet again . Hopefully , some of us on Earth can dispense with a niggling lovemaking for the spacecraft that helped us see our thin , beautiful planet from a new view .
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