Life Beyond the Pale Blue Dot
At a distance of 3.7 billion miles from the sun, on an otherwise ordinary February day in 1990, the Voyager 1 probe turned to point its camera platform away from its headlong rush into the cosmic void. A narrow-angle optic switched on and snapped a sequence of brief shots.
One of the sensor’s tiny pixels, spanning about the length of a dozen bacteria lined up end to end, registered an increased charge. There, among the sun’s lens flare, diffracted light, and electronic noise, sat an extra point of light. It was the smallest of small blips, an inconsequential mote in the emptiness of space, and it had a pale blue hue.
This mote was us, our world, Earth—a shockingly abrupt summation of 4 billion years of complex and chaotic history. The image taken that day was the ultimate selfless selfie. It provided an existential perspective that is unique among the species on our planet: Only we humans have seen ourselves from billions of miles away. Carl Sagan would later immortalize the image with the title, the “Pale Blue Dot.”
The Pale Blue Dot was the latest in a long history of association of the color blue with our home in the universe, and with life itself. Two decades before Voyager, as Apollo 8 circled the moon, astronauts recorded the now-famous “Earthrise”—a stunning color photograph of a bright blue-white hemisphere suspended above
