Why Pale Blue Dot generates feelings of cosmic insignificance

Summary

On St Valentine’s Day 1990, NASA’s engineers directed the space-probe Voyager 1 – at the time, 6 billion kilometres (3.7 billion miles) from home – to take a photograph of Earth. Pale Blue Dot (as the image is known) represents our planet as a barely perceptible dot serendipitously highlighted by a ray of sunlight transecting the inky-black of space – a ‘mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam’, as Carl Sagan famously put it. But to find that mote of dust, you need to know where to look. Spotting its location is so difficult that many reproductions of the image provide viewers with a helpful arrow or hint (eg, ‘Earth is the blueish-white speck almost halfway up the rightmost band of light’). Even with the arrow and the hints, I had trouble locating Earth when I first saw Pale Blue Dot – it was obscured by the smallest of smudges on my laptop screen. The striking thing, of course, is that Pale Blue Dot is, astronomically speaking, a close-up. Were a comparable image to be taken from any one of the other planetary systems in the Milky Way, itself one of between 200 billion and 2 trillion galaxies in the cosmos, then we wouldn’t have appeared even as a mote of dust – we wouldn’t have been captured by the image at all. Pale Blue Dot inspires a range of feelings – wonderment, vulnerability, anxiety. But perhaps the dominant response it elicits is that of cosmic insignificance. The image seems to capture in concrete form the fact that we don’t really matter. Look at Pale Blue Dot for 30 seconds and consider the crowning achievements of humanity – the Taj Mahal, the navigational exploits of the early Polynesians, the paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe, the inventions of Leonardo da Vinci, John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, Cantor’s theorem, the discovery of DNA, and on and on and on. Nothing we do – nothing we could ever do – seems to matter. Pale Blue Dot is to human endeavour what the Death Star’s laser was to Alderaan. What we seem to learn when we look in the cosmic mirror is that...