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.
Carl Sagan’s famous quote from Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space describes the feeling this image first invoked. In 1990, a spacecraft named Voyager 1 (traveling at 38,610 MPH) captured an image that would change the way we see our place in the universe.
Voyager was launched in 1977, with the task to explore Jupiter and Saturn. NASA had no plans or expectations for the spacecraft to operate beyond Saturn's orbit.
As Voyager ventured further into space, an idea began to take root, and this led to a bold act by NASA. Commands were sent to Voyager 1 to rotate its camera and snap a photo from 3.7 billion miles from Earth. The spacecraft was operating in conditions it was not explicitly designed for, and there was always the danger that something could go wrong, but the experiment worked: an image was captured.
This was all Sagan’s idea, of course.
He recognized that such an image would have little, if any, scientific value. After all, what could a grainy, distant photo of Earth tell us that closer, more detailed images hadn't already?
“A mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam,” Sagan later quipped.
Yet that insignificant speck was Earth. And it did exactly what Sagan had hoped: It changed the way we see things. Realizing how tiny and insignificant all of our worldly concerns are (relative to the cosmos) has helped many of us shift our perspective.
Such a shift in perspective happens only every so often, but this is a great example of a powerful image prompted such a change. Today, I want to talk about a few other “pale blue dots” that have had profound effects on a similar scale.
Hubble Ultra Deep Field
If the Pale Blue Dot image made us feel tiny, the Hubble Ultra Deep Field image made us feel utterly insignificant.
In 1995, a Sagan-esque experiment was performed by the Hubble Telescope, an incredibly expensive and sophisticated piece of equipment. Hubble had just been repaired in an intensive use of the Space Shuttle, and it was perhaps the most valuable scientific resource ever invented.
Therefore, pointing it directly at a blank spot of the sky—no larger than a grain of sand held at arm's length if you were peering out there—was a huge gamble, and perceived waste of valuable telescope time.
And yet, this gamble paid off far greater than almost anyone anticipated. In spite of how tiny the space was, there seemed to be no end to the number of galaxies out there. This image came to be called the Hubble Deep Field.
Nine years later, an even more intensive image, now called the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field, emerged after constantly “looking” at one tiny spot over the course of nearly a decade, every time Hubble orbited the earth and could point in that direction.
Take a look at this image:
Nearly every single smear or dot is a galaxy, with hundreds of billions of stars in each galaxy. And, this is an area of the sky smaller than a square millimeter piece of paper held at arm’s length, and about one twenty-six-millionth of the total area of the sky.
10,000 galaxies in 1/26 millionth of the sky.
The Deep Field photograph has had a profound impact on astronomy and our understanding of the universe's scale. Our imagination is unlocked when we consider the unknown potential civilizations out there, and our everyday struggles seem to dissolve into insignificance.
Tank Man
A single man, carrying shopping bags, stood defiantly in front of a column of tanks.
This iconic photograph was taken during the Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing in 1989.
If the Hubble Ultra Deep Field expanded our understanding of the universe's scale, then the image of "Tank Man" forces us to confront the scale of individual courage against seemingly insurmountable odds. It also showcased the authoritarian nature of China, a realization that has influenced global perception of the largest nation in the world.
Tank Man became an enduring symbol of defiance in the face of violent authoritarianism in the west, but in China, TV news called him a “lone scoundrel” and “used images of his protest to demonstrate that soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army had ‘exercised the highest degree of restraint’ when confronting unarmed civilians.”
While the Pale Blue Dot and the Hubble Ultra Deep Field pull our perspective outward, Tank Man pulls it sharply inward. While the astronomical images make us feel tiny, Tank Man has the opposite effect. It asserts the profound impact that just one person can make.
Migrant Mother
Taken in 1936 during the Great Depression, this iconic photo captures a destitute woman named Florence Owens Thompson, surrounded by her children, worry etched onto her face.
While Tank Man forces Americans to look outward, Migrant Mother asks us to turn inward, to the problems facing the US during the Great Depression. Beyond that, this image invokes a sense of empathy. If you have a pulse and are not a sociopath, you were likely impacted the first time you saw this image.
The image galvanized the nation into taking human suffering more seriously. As public awareness of the scale of the Depression grew, the New Deal gained in popularity, rewriting American government for the next hundred years.
Welfare and labor reforms moved to the forefront, and the next three decades saw a focus on improving human rights, including civil rights for Black Americans, and a general recognition that inequality had gone too far.
While Migrant Mother didn’t change the US all by itself, it certainly did some of the heavy lifting: consciousness and awareness was raised in a way that hadn’t happened previously. If Tank Man allowed us to see power in the individual, Migrant Mother showed desperation.
In a nation as rich and powerful as the US, widespread human suffering seemed incongruous. We’re still dealing with this realization today.
Today, we are flooded with images. We might see a thousand on a given day. Most of them make us chuckle, or elicit no reaction at all. Every now and then, though, there’s an image that can change the world.
The power of these “pale blue dots” can remind us how tiny we are, or how important we are. They can make us examine ourselves and our place in the cosmos in unexpected ways. They make us think.
What would you choose as your “pale blue dots”? What images have had the profound power to alter your own understanding of the world, humanity, or yourself?
Let me know in the comments. Let’s think together today.
It’s not a photo coming to mind for me, but memory. Every time I step into the ocean and feel the power of it, I’m reminded of the world’s fragility and interconnectedness. We are small specs on a small spec.
Great post! I highly recommend the film “Particle Fever” about the Large Hadron Collider’s search for the “God particle” - another twist on perspective. My takeaway at the end was a complete surprise to me and profoundly affected how I saw the entire enterprise and the people involved.
As for images, “Earthrise” is a favorite. It goes well with Astronaut Wally Schirra’s note: “I left Earth three times and found no other place to go. Please take care of Spaceship Earth.”
I’m also a sucker for any image that shows people and animals as equals, gazing in delight and wonder at each other. Maybe I’ll share one and tag you in Notes with this post.