by Zenia Zuraiq, III B.Sc. Physics
Image Credits: NASA JPL
On February 14, 1990, the Voyager 1 Space Probe took a photograph of planet Earth from a record distance of about 6 billion kilometres. The photograph (attached above) has since been dubbed “The Pale Blue Dot” owing to how our home planet is a barely visible pixel in it.
A tiny, almost invisible pixel. Almost too easily mistaken for a smidge of dirt on your computer screen.
A pixel that contains all that we know, that contains all of our written history, that contains all our crowning achievements and glories. All of our poetry, our literature, our many, many emotions.
And, oh – that one pixel also contains all your problems.
That one snapshot of the observable universe represents all the petty quarrels and insignificant problems we have. All those times we thought the world was ending? Turns out if the world actually ended, the universe would not be that different, actually.
Pale. Blue. Dot.
We often talk about looking at the big picture, but to me, this represents the biggest picture there is. At any given moment in our collective history, at every minute we spend in our shared present, and continuing on to every second of the ever-approaching future – we were, are, and continue to be the pale blue dot.
Almost invisible.
And sure, this is just the most existential, horror-inducing thing ever.
But maybe it is also the most calming thing ever.
Speaking as someone who is regularly overwhelmed by a lot of things, a lot of the time, it is the suffocating, improbable, unbelievably cold “Bigness” of the universe that ends up calming you down.
All your rigid hierarchies and binaries.
The boundaries and walls you build to exclude each other.
The warring and the debating and all the fighting.
All of my already insignificant and petty anxieties.
All of it comes back to the Pale Blue Dot.
All we have is this weird, shared place in the Universe. Because scientifically, cosmically, on this scale? None of us is really special. The only unique thing about us is this weird Pale Blue Dot that we’ve found ourselves on.
And maybe it’s time we sit back and enjoy this weird, collective experience that we are privileged enough to enjoy. Let’s stop discriminating against people based on the cosmic equivalent of lines in the sand and instead come together, because, as Carl Sagan* beautifully put it –
“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” - (Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, Carl Sagan)
*pioneering astronomer and author, who incidentally requested that Voyager 1 take this photograph in the first place!