And the pale blue dot, at least for me, is– represents the last moment in spacecraft leaving the Earth in which you can see the Earth at all. And that Apollo 17 picture, I think, raised many people to an environmental consciousness. IRA FLATOW: Can we use the pale blue dot as an analogy to that or something that’s even further looking?ĬARL SAGAN: That’s it. That sort of led to movements like the environmental movement when people could see us as a united planet without the political boundaries. IRA FLATOW: You know, back when men were walking on the Moon, there was that famous photo of the Earthrise over the Moon, and the, I guess you might call it the bright blue marble compared to your pale blue dot. And it underscored the tininess, the comparative insignificance of our world and ourselves, as you said in your opening remarks. Everybody you know, everybody you love, everybody you ever heard of lived out their lives there on a mote of dust in a sunbeam.Īnd it spoke to me about the need for us to care for one another and also to preserve the pale blue dot, which is the only home we’ve ever known. And if we had photographed it from a much further distance, it would have been gone, lost against the backdrop of distant stars.Īnd to me, it– I thought there, that’s us. But when we took the picture, there was something about it that seemed to me so poignant, vulnerable, tiny. And that is to turn the cameras on one of these spacecraft back to photograph the planet from which it had come.Īnd clearly, there would not be much scientific data from this because we were so far away that the Earth was just a point, a pale blue dot. And after they swept by the Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune systems, it was possible to do something I had wanted to do from the beginning.
Why the title?ĬARL SAGAN: Well, I was an experimenter on the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft. That’s always the first question that every interviewer asks an author. He is Co-founder and President of the Planetary Society and author of the new book, Pale Blue Dot, published by Random House. Carl Sagan is the David Duncan Professor of Astronomy and Space Science and the Director of the Laboratory of Planetary Studies at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. And so where does that leave us? Astronomer Carl Sagan might say it brings us back to our roots as explorers and may drive us to become interplanetary, even intergalactic wanderers. If we don’t destroy it, maybe a stray asteroid will. There is no guarantee that our boring little rocky planet will be around forever. But in the words of Carl Sagan, “We live on a routine planet near a humdrum star, stuck away in an obscure corner of an unexceptional galaxy which is just one of 100 billion galaxies in the universe.”Īnd if you think that sounds depressing, consider this. We’d all like to think that we’re pretty much the center of attention, the center of the universe. Here’s Carl Sagan on Science Friday recorded December 16, 1994.
We talk about US space policy, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and the place of humans in the universe.
And as you’ll hear, the development of a movie called Contact was still just in the planning stages. His famous book Pale Blue Dot had just been published. And that’s why we’re taking this opportunity to take another listen to this classic conversation with Sagan, recorded 25 years ago this month. As we make our way towards the end of the year, it’s a good time to step back and take a look at the big picture, and I mean really big.įew people could put the cosmos in perspective better than the late astronomer Carl Sagan.