Why the pale blue dot?
That’s here…that’s home…that’s us… The dot is inspired by the inspiring figure of Carl Sagan. An astronomer, TV personality, writer of popular science books and humanist campaigner, but one of Sagan’s most enduring cultural legacies came through his involvement with the Voyager space probe mission and his insistence that once past Saturn Voyager should turn its lens back onto Earth. The resulting photograph is iconic, it shows our planet, as a pale blue dot set against the vast cosmos. Sagan used this image for one of his more famous TV monologues: “We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king
