The Pale Blue Dot

...But, Carl Sagan convinced them to turn Voyager back to Earth and take a final picture.

So on Valentine's Day, 1990, one of the ships slowly rotated so it was facing back to Earth, and it snapped a picture.

One last picture...

Describe it.

So...it's mostly empty. It's pretty dark. You can see sort of streaks of light coming from the sun, and then, you honestly wouldn't notice it if wasn't pointed out to you, but down in one corner... kind of suspended in a sunbeam, there is a very small dot...blue...a pale blue dot...that was us.

In Carl Sagan's words, "Everyone you ever knew, everyone you ever loved, every superstar, every corrupt politician, just everyone in all of history, everything, the sum total...Think of the rivers of blood that have run so that one indistinguishable group could have momentary domination over a fraction of that pixel.."

Every single day I hear from people who take that pale blue dot so deeply to heart.

It was a complete reframing.

After that, the cameras were turned off.

- from Radiolab's story, Is There an Edge to the Heavens?, in the Escape! episode

the frontier was everywhere

the pale blue dot

 We were hunters and foragers.
The frontier was everywhere.
We were bounded only by the Earth, and the ocean, and the sky. The open road still softly calls.
Our little terraquious globe as the madhouse of those hundred thousand millions of worlds.
We, who cannot even put our own planetary home in order, riven with rivalries and hatreds; Are we to venture out into space?
By the time we're ready to settle even the nearest of other planetary systems, we will have changed. The simple passage of so many generations will have changed us. Necessity will have changed us. We're... an adaptable species.
It will not be we who reach Alpha Centauri and the other nearby stars. It will be a species very like us, but with more of our strengths, and fewer of our weaknesses. More confident, farseeing, capable, and prudent. For all our failings, despite our limitations and fallibilities, we humans are capable of greatness.
What new wonders, undreamed of in our time, will we have wrought in another generation? And another? How far will our nomadic species have wandered by the end of the next century? And the next millennium? Our remote descendants, safely arrayed on many worlds through the solar system and beyond, will be unified by their common heritage, by their regard for their home planet, and by the knowledge that whatever other life there may be, the only humans in all the universe come from Earth.
They will gaze up, and strain to find the blue dot in their skies. They will marvel at how vulnerable the repository of raw potential once was. How perilous, our infancy. How humble, our beginnings. How many rivers we had to cross before we found our way.