Pale Blue Dots

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 launch…