A Pale Blue Dot SentForever

Back in 1977, NASA launched two space probes to explore the farthest reaches of our solar system called Voyager 1 and 2. In 1990 NASA instructed Voyager 1 to look back at where it had come from and to take some images. One of them contained a picture of Earth taken from 4 billion miles away. It became known as the Pale Blue Dot picture, because that was all our Earth looked like in the vast expanse of space.

The astronomer and author Carl Sagan gave a talk that year where he said. “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”.

Now, this is where I get blown away because the point at which Voyager took that picture is reached by SentForever’s messages in just under 6 hours after transmission.

Voyager 1 has been traveling for almost 31 years and yet a message transmitted by SentForever will overtake that probe in just 15 hours. That’s because SentForever radio wave transmissions travel at the speed of light.

For me, this really puts our delicate existence in the universe into context. When you consider the miracle that is what we call “our everyday life” is us just floating in a vast cosmos of nothingness – why on earth would we waste our time arguing and fighting when we should be appreciating all the amazing things that we have?

What are your thoughts on this?