Earth as seen from the Voyager 1
We have all heard the saying, “What a small world.” But as I look up at the heavens at night at the vastness of the cosmos I am reminded just how small we really are and of my own insignificance and how little I am in the great scheme of things, I can see a thousand stars with my naked eye, then turn and look into the telescope at one point of blackness and see a million more. “My eyepiece is but a tiny thimble with a million sparkling diamonds.”
I can see strange gasses of all colors (nebulae) and groups of stars so dense that they glow in the eyepiece like a far off city (Globular Clusters). Distant galaxies glow with their trillions of faint points of light and I wonder, “What would we look like from there?” But for now, we could only imagine.
Well, it turns out we do have a small glimpse of just how small we really are. In 1990, the Voyager 1 spacecraft “the farthest man made object” finished its NASA mission of studying and photographing the far out planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, and was headed for interstellar space. Astronomer Dr. Carl Sagan talked NASA into allowing JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) to turn the spacecraft for one last picture of earth from 3.7 billion miles away.
With all the beautiful close up and colorful pictures being returned to earth of all the planets, the one that stood out to Dr. Sagan was the one of a grainy “Pale Blue Dot” that took 5.5 hours for the signal to reach earth.
I’m reminded of the tiny ant that craws along the ground. He could not imagine how large the world he craws upon really is. And the same with us as we try to see deeper and farther into the cosmos with larger and larger telescopes; we are but a tiny grain of sand in the large ocean of interstellar space. It is said that “astronomy is humbling”; problems of every day become small and insignificant when one stargazes into the larger world beyond our own.
Dr Sagan pointed out that “all of human history has happened on that tiny pixel, everyone we know, everyone that has ever been, every person, everyone you ever heard of, our posturings, our imagined self-importance — Here! Right here! on this “Pale Blue Dot”.
