04/23/2026
On February 14th, 1990, the Earth was being watched.
The object watching Earth was tiny and distant, being over 3,000,000,000 miles away. It is even farther away now – in fact, it’s the first man-made object to ever reach interstellar space.
It was the Voyager 1 spacecraft.
On that date in 1990, Voyager 1 embarked on its journey beyond our planets, Carl Sagan, the famous astronomer, asked NASA to turn the probe’s camera around to take one last photograph of the Solar System.
Between February 1 and June 6, Voyager took sixty still images. Each image contained about 640,000 individual pixels, and as the probe was so far away, it took about 5½ hours for each pixel to reach Earth.
The most famous of these photographs was of our home planet – now just a pale blue dot amidst the infinite blackness of space.
As simple as it is, we think this is one of the most thought-provoking pictures ever taken. It serves to illustrate just how small we really are compared to the vastness of the Universe.
But it also serves another, more powerful purpose.
April 22 is Earth Day. Some people will observe the event in their own way, but many more will probably fail to remember Earth Day exists at all.
And yet, we wonder if we wouldn’t attach more importance to Earth Day if we all took a few minutes, once a year, to simply look at that pale blue dot. Because there’s something else the picture illustrates.
Carl Sagan himself said it best:
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. 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.
This April 22, we invite you to celebrate Earth Day. Even if we do nothing else but feel the warmth of the Sun, smell the flowers in bloom, ponder the depths of the night sky, or just speak a little more kindly to each other, it will be enough.
Happy Earth Day!
