Sampampam: 2014

Behind the Pale Blue Dot Perhaps you've seen this view of Earth before. Dubbed the "pale blue dot" by astronomer Carl Sagan, it shows how Earth looked to the Voyager spacecraft when the spacecraft was 6.4 billion kilometers away. And perhaps you've read the famous passage this image inspired from Sagan. "That's here, that's home, that's us," he wrote. "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 the mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."