On this pebble, all of human drama has been played out like cosmic role-play gaming: sides and forces, good and evil, pushing and pulling, winning and losing.

Here we find and pinpoint the centerpiece of human drama - a flickering tenth-of-a-pixel in the HiDef expanse of our limitless universe. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.” 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. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. “Look again at that dot,” he said later, reflecting on the image. Sagan later gave the image its notorious name “the pale blue dot.” And what they captured was the first portrait of our planet from the edge of its Solar System, 3.7 billion miles away, an image of the earth measuring less than 0.12 pixels, a soft dot sitting in what appears to be a beam of preferential light. Making it known that such a photograph would offer nothing of scientific value, they complied.

Just before NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft left our Solar System in 1989 to take atmospheric readings from interstellar space, the late astronomer Carl Sagan, then a member of the mission’s imaging team, entreated officials to turn the camera backward to capture one last snapshot of earth.

Cosmos pale blue dot