We live in the era of the selfie, a photo one has taken of oneself. Unsurprisingly, the most retweeted image till date is a selfie orchestrated by Ellen DeGeneres during the 2014 Academy Awards. Even though selfies have been around for as long as cameras have existed, the act of taking your own picture has earned a name for itself with the advent of the smartphone and the complimentary development of social media as a way to share these self-portraits.
On Valentine’s Day 1990, more than 25 years ago, we took a selfie, not on the human scale of an arm’s length but on an astronomical scale, from a distance of six billion kilometres! It was taken by a camera on board Voyager 1, a spacecraft launched in 1977 by NASA to study the giant planets Jupiter and Saturn and then travel beyond our solar system and roam the great distances between the stars. After the end of its primary mission, as it crossed the orbit of the planet Neptune, it was instructed to turn its camera around for one last look home. The image was radioed back to the Earth. It shows the Earth as a tiny dot, less than a pixel across, against the vast darkness of space, hanging in a ray of sunlight. Vulnerable, lonely, beautiful.
The great astronomer Carl Sagan later reflected on the significance of this picture in his unique, prophetic, prescient style. He wrote in his book, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space:
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“From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again 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.
“The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
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“The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand. 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.”
When this picture was taken, the biggest threat to the survival of this planet was a nuclear war between the two superpowers, but today it is climate change. We have all learnt to speak for our nations, our religions, our people, our communities. This picture shows us that we are one world and Carl implores us to speak for the earth.
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